"Margaret Maron is back with a new mystery featuring her critically acclaimed sleuth Judge Deborah Knott"--Provided by publisher.

Judge Deborah Knott is looking forward to a break from married life and the responsibilities of being a mom when she travels to Wrightsville Beach for a summer conference for North Carolina district court judges. But shortly after Deborah arrives, she stumbles upon the strangled corpse of one of her less-admired colleagues, and it doesn't take long before she realizes that the killer may have another target - one much closer to home.

When Deborah Knott's terminally ill aunt, Rachel, is found smothered to death in her bed at a hospice center, all of her Colleton County kith and kin are shocked. Who kills a dying woman? As Deborah and her husband, Sheriff's Deputy Dwight Bryant, try to find Rachel's killer, they cross paths with the Designated Daughters, a support group for caregivers, not all of whom are women. Rachel's flamboyant daughter, Sally, is a member, and when a con artist...

"On a quiet August morning, Judge Deborah Knott's father Kezzie makes a shocking discovery on a remote corner of his farm: the body of a man bludgeoned to death. Investigating this crime, Deborah's husband, Sheriff's Deputy Dwight Bryant, soon uncovers a long-simmering hostility between Kezzie and the slain man over a land dispute. The local newspaper implies that Deborah's family may have had something to do with the murder-and that Dwight is dragging...

North Carolina judge Deborah Knott and her husband Deputy Dwight Bryant are looking forward to Christmas until a traffic fatality turns out not to be an accident.

Judge Deborah Knott and Sheriff's Deputy Dwight Bryant are back home in Colleton County with all their family and courthouse regulars. But there are a few new faces as well. Lt. Sigrid Harald and her mother, Anne, a well-known photographer, are down from New York to visit Anne's ailing mother, Mrs. Lattimore. When the group gathers for dinner at Mrs. Lattimore's Victorian home, they meet the enigmatic Martin Crawford, an ornithologist who claims to...