A Death in Bulloch Parish - Hardcover

In this follow-up to Land Kills , easygoing journalism professor and ex-reporter Mitch Stevens leaves New York City for Louisiana. After Tom Cantwell, Mitch's friend and mentor, dies in Louisiana while researching material for a book about a Civil War spy, Mitch promises the widow to consider finishing the project. He goes to Virgil, La., to talk to Martha Tour Gale, the last person Tom interviewed, but finds out that she too has recently died. Mitch learns that Tom, who apparently died of natural causes, believed that someone had broken into his motel room to look at his papers. Suspecting that both his friend and the old woman may have been murdered, Mitch traces Tom's leads and in the process is amazed by the overt racism he observes in the town. Learning to navigate the unfamiliar intricacies of Southern society, black and white, Mitch uncovers secrets of the past so dark that one of Virgil's leading citizens will kill to keep them buried. Staving off attempts on his own life, Mitch calls on research and reporting skills to solve both the historical puzzle and the modern-day crimes, all the while being educated in a tradition of racism and exposed to its current forms. Although a little heavy on the message, this entertaining tale is deftly plotted and well cast.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Big-city reporter turned small-town journalism prof Mitch Stevens leaves Vermont for deepest Louisiana to wind up the affairs of his late mentor Tom Cantwell--and to continue research on a book Tom had been planning about Major Thomas Clay Washburn, hanged as a spy for his plan to liberate Confederate officers from a northern prison. But somebody doesn't want Mitch to interview one of Tom's informants, old Martha Tour Gale, who knew the slave who went off to war with Washburn: she's as dead as Tom before Mitch gets to see her, and Mitch has to penetrate a screen of casual racism, southern hospitality, and lethal home-cooking to find out what dread secret Tom had pried out of her. That secret, thanks to floods of genealogical detail, is both confusing and all too obvious; by taking Mitch out of the firmly detailed Vermont milieu of his debut (Land Kills, 1991), his creators have thinned out the atmosphere without providing a stronger plot. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.