Book Review: Judas Burning -- Carolyn Haines

Carolyn Haines was a writer I had never heard of, but the novel's title caught my eye, held it long enough to intrigue, and prompted me to pick the book up and read the flap. And I was hooked, piqued by the premise. And after a couple chapters, I was reading page after page without wanting to put Judas Burning down.

A mystery, Judas Burning is set in the Deep South, in a Mississippi barely touched by the technological advances of the modern world. Dixon Sinclair is a returned daughter of small Jexville, come home to do her father, a famous newspaperman, proud. She now runs the local paper and is hellbent to make it work, to report the truth, and to overcome her alcoholism as well. And as she begins to take on the small town powers-that-be, the disappearance of two high shool girls intrudes on the sleepy little town at the same time a religious statue has been decapitated.

Connected? Maybe. And thus, Dixon Sinclair begins to help the local sheriff, another returned child of Jexville, and a famous reporter on the trail of a church desecrator. And time is of the essence, especially when the first girl's body is found.

With a cast of characters right out of a Faulkner novel, Haines has constructed a story of AnySmallTown, South. Everybody knows everybody, and everbody's privacy is just as good as his neighbor's discretion. With several scandals and a murder woven into a twisted plot of political corruption and religion, Haines has the audacity to keep a running subplot going throughout the novel, one that haunts her protagonist -- the doubt that a man sitting on death row may not have killed her father. And the author pulls it off with skill.

A very entertaining read, Judas Burning is a novel of idiosyncracies and insecurities, of the past's shadow ever darkening the present, of repressed tensions just under the surface ready to be released. It is also a novel of betrayal. (And what kind of southern-set novel would it be without some sort of betrayal?) Carolyn Haines has produced a masterful mystery of local color to compete with Hamilton, Block, Jance, Hillerman, and Parker. Judas Burning is that good. Good enough to keep you hooked till the end.

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