As far as endearing, small-town amateur elder sleuths go, Agatha Christie's Miss Marple has some competition in Josephine "Jo" Wright, who features in De'Shawn Charles Winslow's splendid second novel, Decent People, a mystery in which there's a lot more at stake than finding a murderer. It's March 1976 as the novel begins, and 60-year-old Jo has just returned to her home on the "Black side" of West Mills, N.C., after two weeks away. There's news, and not the good kind: her fiancé, Olympus "Lymp" Seymore, is suspected of fatally shooting his three half-siblings--the Harmons, as they're known--in the stately home the three of them share. Unfortunately for Lymp, someone overheard the heated remarks he made about his half-siblings just prior to the murders. While Jo's hunger for justice compels her to look for the killer, she privately concedes another motive: finding the perpetrator would reassure her that it's not Lymp.
Decent People revisits the turf and several characters that Winslow introduced in his debut novel, In West Mills. This time around, he hands off the novel's point of view to various characters, white and Black, who--for reasons of their own--had issues with the Harmons. In so doing, he both fortifies his mystery and tells these characters' stories, all of which intersect and are tainted by the triple scourge of racism, classism and homophobia. It's fair to say that in West Mills, the canal, which acts as a color line, courses with bad blood in both directions. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer