Sweet and Deadly

Catherine Linton came home to Lowfield, Mississippi convinced that the untimely deaths of her parents in a car accident was no accident but nobody believed her. So she stayed, taking a job at the local paper, to try to both convince the sheriff that she was right-and maybe convince herself she was wrong. After all, her father had been the town doctor, loved (she always thought) by all. To think he was killed was to think that one of her friends or neighbors has harbored some deep resentment toward him. Then she finds the dead body of the women who had been her father's nurse for many years. Obviously murdered. Now Catherine knows that she was not wrong about her parent's death. Someone in Lowfield has a terrible secret, a secret worth killing for. Not once, not twice, but when another body is found three times. And the killer won't hesitate to add more victims to the list, as Catherine gets closer and closer to the truth.
"SHE PASSED A dead dog on her way to the tenant shack.
It was already stiff, the legs poker-straight in rigor. It had been a big dog, maybe dun-colored; with only a quick glimpse, Catherine could not be sure. It was covered in the fine powdery dust that every passing vehicle threw up from the dirt road in the dry Delta summer. In her rearview mirror she saw the cloud raised by her passage hanging in the air after she had passed, a cloud dividing endless rows of cotton. But the road was too poor to allow many backward glances. She wondered briefly why someone had been driving so fast on the caked and rutted dirt that he had not seen the dog in time to swerve. A sideways look at the cotton told Catherine that it would make a sad crop this year. The heat had lasted too long, unbroken by rain. This land was Catherine’s, had been her great-grandfather’s; but Catherine rented it out as her father had done. She was glad she did as she recalled her grandfather’s irascibility in bad years, when she had ridden with him across “the place,” as cotton planters called their acres. She didn’t remember the heat of those dim summers equaling the ferocity of this one. Even this early in the morning, with dawn not too long past, Catherine was beginning to sweat. Later in the day the glare would be intolerable, without considerable protection, to all but the swarthiest. To someone of Catherine’s whiteness of skin it would be disastrous."