If there's truly such a thing as an American "cozy,"Margaret Maron's novels of the contemporary South fit the bill. Not that DeborahKnott, the sexy, smart young district court judge whose extended family of 10siblings, a curmudgeonly father who used to be a moonshiner, anduncles, aunts, nephews, and nieces too numerous to count, bears anyresemblance to the maiden ladies of that beloved British genre. But like herEnglish counterparts, Maron eschews blood and gore, and concentratesinstead on manners, mores, and motives. And she has few equals on either sideof the Atlantic; she weaves telling portraits of ordinary people coping with out-of-the-ordinary circumstances, often in less thana couple of sentences, and tells the whole history of a landscape and a wayof life in one short paragraph.
