Quote: The night of the first murder, a full moon sailed over middle Georgia. Silver light and purple velvet shadows lent lawns, rooftops, and the broad, slick leaves of magnolias a luster of romance and mystery they didn’t generally deserve. The very air pulsed with the glow.
In Hopemore, Georgia--county seat of little Hope County located mid- way between Augusta, Macon, and nowhere--residents slept fitfully. Yard dogs howled. A preacher dreamed strange dreams. And Amanda Kent let the wrong person in.

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When a young nurse is brutally murdered in Hopemore, Georgia, MacLaren Yarbrough is begged by her son Walker to prove that his good friend and Mac’s youth pastor, Luke Blessed, didn’t kill her. "This is real important to me, Mama," he pleads.
The primary case the police have against Luke is that he lived next door to Amanda and dreamed the murder in vivid detail. Such vivid detail, in fact, that they are certain he’s trying to confess.
Mac figures the best way to prove Luke didn’t kill Amanda is to find out who did-- particularly since things are slow at Yarbrough Feed, Seed and Nursery in mid-summer and her husband, Judge Joe Riddley Yarbrough, has gone fishing. But she is horrified when her investigation leads her right back to Walker. She’s even more horrified when a sister member of her garden club, Lorena Duckworth, gets strangled the night after the annual Garden Club Buffet at her own mansion, and a young Jewish man, Gideon Levy is found dead the next morning.
Why has placid little Hopemore become the center of such a maelstrom of murder?
The last straw for Mac is when her own Joe Riddley gets shot. Why would anybody want to shoot the magistrate?
By the time she figures out who shot Joe Riddley, killed Lorena and Gideon, and beat Amanda to death, she’s on the wrong end of a circular table, pinned into the corner of her own kitchen by the murderer.
The germ for this book came out of the true case of a young man who dreamed a vivid dream of a beating at almost exactly the time a young woman was beaten to death down the street. That case was never solved, but it raised some interesting questions about the role of the supernatural in daily life.
I carried that idea around for years until it found a home in Hopemore and drew to itself such characters as Maniac Spence, with a passion for southern historian, and Loretta Duckworth, with more money than scruples.
I’d also been wondering how to elevate Mac from magistrate’s wife to magistrate. The murderer, with a very plausible motive, did that for me. Which is one answer to But Why Shoot the Magistrate? In her next case, Mac will be Judge MacLaren Yarbrough.

Please do me a favor: If your public library doesn't have this book, would you ask them to get it for their shelves? An enthusiastic reader is the best endorsement. Thanks!
ALSO AVAILABLE IN LARGE PRINT EDITION, ISBN 0-7862-2060-0.