Quietly Dead

by Laura Belgrave

Book Overview

Two seemingly unrelated deaths have more in common than meets the eye, and when Detective Claudia Hershey looks beyond the evidence, she finds herself face-to-face with someone who will stop at... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1570721726
• ISBN13: 9781570721724
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Overmountain Press
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 1.21 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.4" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Engaging Florida police procedural

An engaging police procedural set in a sweaty Central Florida town. Claudia Hershey is the only woman in a two-man police department of Indian Run, a small town in the dead center of Florida "where you can never catch a breeze in the summer and the cows take forever to cross the road and are not speeded up by honking." Her boss is the unimaginative and gruff Chief Suggs and police station that was the equivalent of a one-room schoolhouse. She had once worked in big- time law enforcement in Cleveland, but she moved to Indian Run for the simpler lifestyle of a small Florida town.Well, her strategy seems to be paying off. Her teenage daughter Robin is now under much better control than in the Series debut, "In The Spirit Of Murder." But in her second story, Claudia is saddled with "Booey," a student intern and godson or nephew of irascible chief Suggs. If you agree that a central Florida hick town is the worthy object of a police procedural, you will love "Quietly Dead." Laura Belgrave takes aim at Indian Run, picking off high- and low-lying targets with the precision of a Florida Cracker bushwhacker.The story begins with an unremarkable death: Wanda Farr, the "Cat Woman," discovered drown in her bathtub in her trailer. The next death was discovered in "No Name Pond," which wasn't a pond at all, but a part of the canal system that "meandered in and out of Lake Okeechobee to the south ? a liquid highway carved from the ground for water management and used for just about everything else." This death didn't seem remarkable either: Henry Becker was an old guy with a history of wandering off.But Claudia is a stickler for details. When the M.E. report comes back and she deduces Old Henry had to have been dead before he went into "No Name Pond." Claudia Hershey is much more than a stickler for details. She is a role model for middle-aged feminine practicality. She performs bureaucratic duties and work around the eccentricities of her boss without a word of complaint, she administers tough love or sound advice to teenagers, and will step in and mother an orphaned cat. So we are always rooting for her as she works away, methodically and unpretentiously, towards that moment of truth under the strong Florida sun. And she probably wouldn't mind if we figure out who is the murderer as quickly as she does.Claudia Hershey is sweet, but she won't melt under the Florida sun. Laura Belgrave has also given us a starkly lit portrait of the Central Florida, of its canals, camphor trees and weed patches, and of its available recreations -- bass fishing, maybe golf but more probably bowling, maybe cockfighting -- and sometimes murder.