Glynn Marsh Alam opens her books with a riveting statement that sets the tone for the mystery. This novel, her fourth in the Luanne Fogarty series opens: "The waters of the South are like its people, with dangerous undercurrents and a deep beauty. And like the people, they hide ghosts that ride the surface in the early morning mists.... We all live with ghosts. Some of us die with them." Her ability to blend the gruesome and the beautiful amazes me. "...I do know a good many... have found their eternal niche where cold waters swirl over blue flesh." A part of me wishes she would carry this lyrical, introspective tone throughout the book. But then, the refreshing voice of Luanne Fogarty invites me in to share her adventure. She sounds like a friend I want to swap gossip with over a cup of coffee. Her acceptance and familiarity of the Palmetto River's murky waters gives me courage to step into the surrounding swamps of Northern Florida. In Bilge Water Bones a teenage boy disappears after a joy ride with friends in his father's boat. The friends swim to shore, the boat sinks and Luanne and Vernon, her lover and fellow diver for the local sheriff's department, look for the boy. Instead Luanne discovers long-dead human remains in the bilge of an old wreck. Alam creates strong and quirky characters such as Luanne's favorite neighbor, eighty-something Pasquin. He introduces Luanne to his swamp community, including a crazy, old, wrinkled streaker who may know of a connection between the missing boy and the dead body. The author's and Luanne's love for the natural world of the river and northern Florida swamps seep through the pages. Yet the author describes her favorite swampy setting as the perfect atmosphere for death and murder. At times the setting feels so real I smell the decaying earth and hear the mosquitoes hum. If only Alam would make her less quirky characters seem as real as her swamp. Luanne, Vernon, the sheriff, all need more facets, more details, more conflict, more moods, more life. But her plot twists take unexpected turns and interweave with a satisfying complexity that make this a delightfully spooky and puzzling mystery series. Dawn Goldsmith A multi-published writer of non-fiction and short stories, Dawn Goldsmith also reviews mass market books for Publishers Weekly and writes for a variety of publication including Christian Science Monitor. Click here to share your views.
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Carter Coleman

BIO Carter Coleman, a graduate of Vanderbilt University, has written for the Los Angeles Times Book Review and Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Life, and Rolling Stone. THE VOLUNTEER, Coleman's debut novel, is the story of a Peace Corps worker in Tanzania determined to escape his past in Memphis, Tennessee and forge a new life. Carter Coleman lives in London with his wife and daughter. Back to top.    AUTHOR TALK January 2005 In this interview Carter Coleman, author of THE VOLUNTEER and CAGE'S BEND, talks about being a southern writer and some of the recurring themes in his books (such as mental illness and sexual addiction). He also explains how he developed his ideas for his first two novels and offers advice to aspiring authors about getting published. Question: CAGE'S BEND focuses on a single family, the Rutledges. They are Southern, from Tennessee and Louisiana, just as you are. You also used the name Rutledge in your first novel, THE VOLUNTEER. So let us ask right off the bat, who are the Rutledges --- purely fiction, a composite, or real people? Is your writing autobiographical? If so, how much of this family's history is your own? Carter Coleman: Rutledge Jordan of THE VOLUNTEER is a cousin of Cage Rutledge and his family of CAGE'S BEND. Using surnames as Christian names is a southern idiosyncrasy. Interconnecting novels through shared characters is aping Faulkner. Like Rut Jordan, I spent several years in Africa --- though I was never in the Peace Corps and never seduced an African girl to save her from circumcision. Like Cage, Nick, and Harper Rutledge, I have two brothers and an Episcopal bishop for a father, though I never spent time in an institution, died in a head-on collision, or worked on Wall Street. I am very close to someone who suffers from bipolar disorder. My fiction is a mixture of fact and imagination and sometimes wishful thinking. Some of my characters are inspired by people I've met and others spring fully formed from my mind. Q: You've been called a "powerful new voice in southern fiction." Do you think of yourself as a southern writer? If so, why? If not, why not? CC: On a superficial level, THE VOLUNTEER was a Hemingway imitation with a southern twist, and CAGE'S BEND mimicked Faulkner. I think of myself as a southern writer because my characters come from the South, though they don't always stay there. Because of the preoccupation with the past in the present. Because of the strength of the family bonds. I wonder if within another twenty years the South will have been homogenized to the degree that it will be indistinct from the rest of the country. In CAGE'S BEND there is a chapter called "The End of the South," in which the boys' grandfather declares that the region has lost its unique identity. Q: The South has produced an immense body of outstanding American literature. And you write that "Every good southern family has a manic-depressive." Do you see a link between growing up in the South, mental instability, the creative spark, and the tendency, perhaps, to drink? CC: I think that most families --- North, South, East or West --- have at least one problematic member, someone suffering from mental illness or addiction, someone who doesn't fit into the workplace as easily as the rest. I'm not sure that there is more craziness in the South. It appears to me and others have observed to me that southerners more often tend to be heavy drinkers. Of course lots of manic-depressives drink to self-medicate. And there have been a number of brilliant bipolar and unipolar writers across the country. In Southern Lit at Vanderbilt, if I recall correctly after twenty years, it was taught that the defeat of the South after the Civil War and the hardship and poverty that the region endured accounted for the South's outsize contribution to American letters. I don't have a theory that ties everything together. Q: It might be argued that Cage is the protagonist of this novel. But which character, if any, is most like you and speaks with your own voice? CC: Nick, the ecologist who dies at twenty-seven, the middle son, occupies the same position in the sequence of siblings as I do in real life. I have dedicated much of my life to planting millions of trees in Africa and, like Nick, believe that the last great cause is the fight to save the planet. Q: You write movingly and realistically about mental illness. How were you able to do this? How accurate are your shocking descriptions of mental and penal institutions? CC: I spoke at length to people who suffer from manic depression. I read everything I could find on the illness. I sat down for long months at the keyboard, pretending that I was manic or depressed or recovering. I visited several institutions and I would say that my descriptions are pretty accurate. Q: Do you believe mental illness is misunderstood by most people? Do you advocate a better social response to mental illness than institutionalization and punishment? What are your ideas? CC: Most people have very little understanding of mental illnesses. How could you unless you are close to someone who suffers from manic depression, schizophrenia, or another disorder? And, unless you have an intimate knowledge of such disorders, your natural response will be fear and avoidance. Who has the time to let someone nutty into one's life? Clearly a paranoid individual will never recover in a horrific institution. I have heard that during the Reagan era many thousands of mentally ill were turned loose and ended up homeless. In America, the social net to catch the mentally ill is in tatters. Those without family support are pretty much doomed. A better response, a better place to get better, might be a big farm where the "mental-health consumers" could tend organic vegetables and hold group therapy sessions in sunny meadows. Q: Besides Cage's mental illness, the field of psychology and psychological theories, such as Jung's idea of the shadow self, figure hugely in this novel. You begin the novel with a quote from Jung's MEMORIES, DREAMS and REFLECTIONS. Would you talk about your interest in the shadow self? Should we embrace it or fight it? CC: Everyone has a shadow. In some people it is stronger than others. Some people have to struggle long and hard with their shadows --- their demons, their addictions, their base inclinations --- while others don't seem so tempted toward straying and self-destruction. The concept of the shadow is a tool toward self-discovery. If you ever make the effort to record dreams, which is hard at first but becomes easier with time and practice, you begin to see that your unconscious mind creates little surreal vignettes that dramatize the needs and actions of your shadow versus your better self. You should embrace the knowledge of your shadow. You should fight to master it. Q: Why did you write about three brothers? Why not two or four? Why not any sisters? Are the three brothers in any way symbolic of the different parts of the self? If so, why does Nick, "the good brother," die? CC: Cage is the unbridled id? Harper is the highly adaptive ego? And Nick is the conscience, the superego, who, being dead, is unable to exert restraint upon his older id and younger ego? You could make the case, but it wasn't intentional on my part. Rather, as I said, I grew up with two brothers and took that as a starting point for my stab at a Southern family novel. Sometimes I considered trying sisters, which would be a more commercial subject. And Nick wasn't purely good. He had his faults. Three brothers was a handful. Perhaps that's why Nick died, to reduce my workload. Q: You also begin the book with a quote from Dr. Seuss: "Dad is sad" (p. xi). Then you write on page 364, "like fathers, like sons." But the father in this story, Franklin Rutledge, is not like his sons. He has been shaped, at least partially, by a different set of generational experiences. The youngest son Harper says, "Our parents represent Depression Man, raised in austerity, while we are Consumer Man, spoiled by abundance" (p. 346). It's a complex issue to be sure, but do you think nature or nurture has a bigger impact on personality? CC: After the pretentious Jung epigraph, the Dr. Seuss bit was a joke to break the spell, while at the same time serious. The very-sad-dad-who-had-a-bad-day is universal, and the industrial dads (and now moms) who see so little of their children, who bring home the frustration of their jobs, are responsible, often unwittingly and arguably unavoidably, for the anger and alienation of their children. The ideal environment to raise children is a situation where the parents are around most of the time and where, at the times when they are not, grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins are there to pick up the slack. The Rutledge boys are a reaction to their parents --- almost, as Cage says, a manifestation of Frank's shadow. At the same time, they resemble their father --- the way Cage and Nick quote poetry, the way Harper tithes, for example. Clearly, each generation is shaped by the mores and experiences of its time. How much is inherited genetically I cannot say, but I believe that mental illness is genetic, though I believe that it can be exacerbated by drug use and emotional trauma. The nature versus nurture paradigm strikes me as an oversimplification of a complex intertwining of factors. Q: Another recurring theme in your fiction is womanizing and sexual addiction. Do you think American culture promotes promiscuity and discourages fidelity? CC: I don't think our culture is any more promiscuous than any other culture. Europeans thought America's obsession with Bill Clinton's infidelities ridiculous, and the fact that Clinton was impeached for lying about an affair while Bush got away with lying about the justification of a war speaks to a deep puritanical streak in American culture. Infidelity in France is almost codified. In Africa promiscuity is an irrelevant word --- African cultures are described by anthropologists as "sex positive." One imagines America became more promiscuous in the '60s, and generations raised on MTV and pop music are more sexually active than their predecessors, but taking a global perspective, America probably encourages fidelity more than many cultures. Q: You've lived in Tanzania and also in London. Have you become an expatriate? If so, why? If not, what has living abroad taught you about America? About yourself? CC: I originally went to Tanzania on a Rotary Club international scholarship and stayed for three years because I fell in love with the beautiful country and the friendly, easygoing people. I launched a village-based rainforest conservation project, which takes me back every year, because I wanted to save a forest of extraordinary beauty. Now I live in London because my wife has a house and family here. As we have no plans to move to the States, I suppose I am an expatriate. Distance always gives one perspective and the ability to juxtapose how things are done differently in different cultures. One notices lots of differences. Maybe the most obvious is cars. On the whole, Americans drive huge cars and think cheap gasoline is a God-given right and give little thought to climate change, while Europeans... Q: On a different subject, would you talk about the difference between writing a second novel and writing a first? CC: Being a writer is like being a musician. The more you practice, the better you get. So a second novel is easier because you've learned a lot writing the first. Q: You choose to write provocatively about controversial subjects. As a result critics either love you or hate you. Do you expect people to get upset at what you write? Do you read reviews? How do you handle negative reactions? CC: Women in particular loathed Rutledge Jordan, while I considered him to be an honest depiction of a young man of his time, and while many women found him irredeemable, I thought he redeemed himself through the course of the novel. As I recall, much of the criticism was about what a jerk Rut was and how he wasn't condemned for it. When Shelby Foote introduced me at a reading in Memphis, he quoted Stephen Crane: "Preaching is fatal to art in literature. I try to give a slice of life, and if there is any moral or lesson in it I do not point it out. I let the reader find it for himself...An artist, I think, is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself at will through certain experiences sideways, and every artist must be in some things as powerless as a dead snake." I keep Shelby's typed note on my study wall. I do expect that some folks will take umbrage to aspects of my writing. I might be trying to piss them off. I do read reviews and sometimes I curse and mutter about how the reviewer misconstrued it or how I'd like to see him do better, and later I either laugh about the reviews or forget them. Q: What do you want to write about next? Do you have any plans for a next book? CC: I've started a book about a psychiatrist in Baton Rouge who is having a midlife nervous breakdown. I'm drawn to psychological crisis. I'm drawn back to the South. I want to write about another southern family. I want to write about a dying mother, which strikes me as a great, universal subject. I want to write about changing social mores --- the doctor's teenage children. I want to write about a black character in the contemporary South, a woman in recovery from crack addiction. I want to write about the struggle for faith and redemption. I want to invade Walker Percy territory. Q: Your style demands that you speak in many voices. Your book is lengthy. Your themes are "big" and emotionally complex. Is writing fun for you? Is it cathartic? CC: Writing is like stumbling across a vast desert. Everyday you slog along, one foot after the other. But sometimes you hit an oasis of inspiration and for a few days you swim in cool streams beneath shady palms in a garden of delights. Then you have to leave the oasis and trudge along again toward another, a speck on the horizon, which might turn out to be just a mirage. Trudging through the deep sand isn't fun, but those days flowing along in the streams are exhilarating and make it worthwhile. I wouldn't say writing is cathartic, but I do come to understand certain emotions and interactions between people better than I did before I spent so much time thinking about them. Q: Would you talk about the process of writing your novels? How do you develop your ideas? What is your daily routine as a writer? Who, if anyone, reads your writing before it is published? CC: I remember in 1990 sitting in a room in an old, run-down colonial hotel in the Usambara Mountains of Tanzania with a knee infected from a motorcycle crash, so I couldn't walk for a couple of weeks. I had a manual typewriter and was going in circles, trying to start my first novel, about an American in Tanzania. That's all I knew and I wasn't getting anywhere. Then it came to me --- he would be a Peace Corps volunteer and he would try to save an African girl from genital mutilation. If Eve was born from a rib, Zanifa was born from her clitoris. I just started inventing around that premise. With CAGE'S BEND, I knew I wanted to trace the course of a character suffering from manic depression, from its onset until the character learns how to control it in early middle age. I knew where to begin and where it would end, A and Z, but I didn't know what would happen in between. It was two of my readers --- my publisher and a friend --- who suggested after the first half of the first draft that I spend equal time with the more "normal" brother. My wife, Saskia Spender, my hilarious, sharp friend Scott Noland, and my publisher, Jamie Raab, all gave me great advice on CAGE'S BEND. Q: Did you have an easy time getting published? What advice would you give to aspiring authors about discipline, finances, or getting published? CC: I started off as a freelance magazine journalist, got my first assignment from Rolling Stone when I was just out of college --- because I knew someone who knew the owner and he liked a piece that I wrote. I wrote for Esquire, Outside, Life, Sports Illustrated. I lived in New York and traveled in literary circles. I dated a wonderful woman, a respected book editor. The great, late George Plimpton became a friend and mentor. So did Bret Easton Ellis, who spent dozens of hours with my first novel, as he has for many aspiring novelists. With their comments, I rewrote my first novel five or six times. When the book was presentable, it was easy for me to get to an illustrious agent. That said, it was never easy to get by. I was often broke between magazine assignments, worked painting apartments, even cleaning apartments, and as a bicycle messenger. My advice is to set aside work hours every day. There's nothing more important than daily routine. Also, it's not the writing but the rewriting. Revise, revise, revise. Don't let rejection stop you cold. For those who don't live in New York and travel in literary circles, I suggest saving up your pennies and going to a writer's conference where writers and agents and editors will at least take a glimpse at your work. To get published you've got to get your work in front of an agent or an editor.

I want to let everyone know about a wonderful site that covers southern books and authors.  It is http://www.southernlitreview.com/ 

This site has everything that you need if you love southern books and writers.  I think it is the best site of southern writing that I have found.  I have done enough google searches to know every southern site on the web but I found this site through a google ad on the google search page and I wonder why it wasn't listed in the search results.

I have gotten into trouble with the administration for posting information about books here and mentioning other websites and they are giving me the following message

Major Update: CONTEXTUAL TARGETED ADVERTISING is PROHIBITED on free member pages. Terms of Service Upgrade Account to remove advertisements on main journal page: click here

From now on I must be careful what I put here.

I do want to tell everyone about James Sawaski and his wonderful book "The Chess Team".  I recommend that you find it at Amazon or somewhere and read it.  He is a wonderful writer and this is a book that I highly recommend.

"Zorro" by Isabel Allende - The story of "Zorro" has enthralled
readers and moviegoers alike for almost a century.  Isabel Allende now
tells how Diego de la Vega became Zorro.  In her telling, he was born
in California to a Spanish landowner and Shoshone mother.  His mother
and grandmother taught him Indian virtues and with his test of manhood
comes his totem, the fox (zorro in Spanish). At 16, his father sent
Diego to Barcelona to teach him fencing and educate him in the
European traditions.  He learned swordplay from a master, fell in love
with a woman, and joined a secret society that protected the poor and
innocent.  Upon returning to America, he wass captured and educated
further by Jean Lafitte.  By the time he comes home to California, he
has become a noble savage with cape, mask, cabellero hat, and sword,
out to avenge the injustices of the Spanish dons.  "Zorro" has
received positive reviews with the Miami Herald saying, "This is a
big, sprawling story, superbly told. Allende, who was asked to write
this book by Zorro licensors, succeeds in breathing new life into this
decades-old character so that he may indeed ride again."
Excerpt and all reviews are at:
http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/zorro

"A Long Way Down" by Nick Hornby - At the beginning of "A Long Way
Down," four people gather on a tower block roof nicknamed Toppers
House.  They've each come to jump to their death, but find that
without being alone, none of them are able to complete the act of
suicide.  The novel is told from the perpective of each of the four.
Jess is the daughter of a government minister mourning a sibling's
death and rebelling against a boring bourgeois life.  Martin is a
former TV star disgraced by an affair with an underage girl.  Maureen
is a middle-aged single mother with a severely disabled son.  J. J. is
an American musician whose recently split with both his band and his
girlfriend.  Their common despair provides themselves an instant
support group, but each of them must still deal with the underlying
causes of their suicidal tendencies.  Nick Hornby's book has received
mixed reviews with the Sunday Times saying, "Although 'A Long Way
Down' is not an evenly successful novel, it justifies Hornby's
decision to write about that misery which we have no need to beg or
borrow, and which makes such strong, strange connections between one
desperate soul and the next."
Excerpt and all reviews are at:
http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/long_way_down

I wanted to let you know about a new book link where you can find David Hunter's books

http://www.silverdaggermysteries.com

Be sure and check out the book links for more great books sites.

My book list is not all southern but the books on the list are all good books and many of them are award winners so they promise to be good reads.

I am adding the following

	Sea Glass	Shreve, Anita
	Crow Lake	Lawson, Mary
	Peace Like a River	Enger, Leif

Reading List  

Rank	Title	Author	Remove?
	The Hornet's Nest	Carter, Jimmy
	The Secret Life of Bees	Kidd, Sue Monk
	Brimstone	Preston, Douglas
	Blink	Dekker, Ted
	Garden Of Beasts	Deaver, Jeffery
	Lake House	Patterson, James
	Days of the Dead	Hambly, Barbara
	Rebel	Cornwell, Bernard
	Atonement	McEwan, Ian
	Life of Pi	Martel, Yann
	Housekeeping	Robinson, Marilynne
	One Hundred Years of Solitude	Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
	Lost Boy Lost Girl	Straub, Peter
	Evan's Gate	Bowen, Rhys
	By A Spider's Thread   (not yet published)	Lippman, Laura
	Every Secret Thing	Lippman, Laura
	Remembering Sarah	Mooney, Chris
	Cold Pursuit	Parker, T. Jefferson
	Out Of The Deep I Cry	Spencer-Fleming, Julia
	Little Girl Lost	Aleas, Richard
	Relative Danger	Benoit, Charles
	The Cloud Atlas	Callanan, Liam
	Country Of Origin	Lee, Don
	Into the Web	Cook, Thomas H.
	Dead Men Rise Up Never	Faust, Ron
	The Confession	Stansberry, Domenic
	Perfect Sax	Farmer, Jerrilyn
	The Drowning Tree	Goodman, Carol
	Scent of a Killer	Heggan, Christiane
	Murder in a Mill Town	Ryan, P. B.
	The Kite Runner	Hosseini, Khaled
	The Once and Future Spy	Littell, Robert
	Ghost Riders	McCrumb, Sharyn
	California Girl	Rice, Patricia
	Cyanide Wells	Muller, Marcia
	The Jane Austen Book Club	Fowler, Karen Joy
	The Winter Queen	Akunin, Boris

I would like to share this website with other readers. http://www.booksfree.com/  It is a place where you can borrow books and get them mailed to your home for as little as 7.99 per month.  I'll admit that the name of the site "booksfree" is misleading and that is aggravating but nevertheless its a great site and its a lot easier getting these books then going to the public library only to find that the books you wanted are not available and in addition to that having to put up with parking, traffic and  puntilious librarians.

The Oxford American Magazine is back!  In addition to the Music Issue it now has a food issue, an art and architectual issue and lots more!

If you have never read Oxford American, take my advice and subscribe to it because it has excellent writing and a music issue that itself is worth the price of the subscription.  You get a free CD with the music issue and it always has great! music!

http://www.oxfordamericanmag.com/index.htm

		NEWS! FAQs Q & A WITH CHARLAINE	CALENDAR OF EVENTS BIBLIOGRAPHY BIOGRAPHY & INTERVIEWS
	See Charlaine in Person! Check her touring schedule for May for locations near you.
	DEAD AS A DOORNAIL in stores in May! ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: CHAPTER ONE	NEWS NEW! 2004 Sapphire Award goes to Charlaine's DEAD TO THE WORLD! The Sookie Stackhouse books have been translated into Japanese, Greek, Spanish and German. The series is now being released in England by Orbit, with a variation of the same covers they had in America. Charlaine has a busy schedule this year. In between promotional trips, she's completed the fifth Sookie Stackhouse book, Dead as a Doornail, due out in May 2005. Here's the jacket copy: "[A] delightful Southern vampire detective series."-The Denver Post "Fans of Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake looking for a lighter version of the vampire huntress should cotton to Sookie Stackhouse," says Publishers Weekly. Charlaine Harris's quirky heroine is an infusion of fresh blood in the world of vampire fiction-and the star of a suspenseful series that really has teeth... Sookie Stackhouse is a cocktail waitress in small-town Louisiana. She's pretty and well-mannered and has only a few close friends-which isn't surprising, since not many people can appreciate Sookie's abilities as a mind reader. It's not a quality that has the guys beating down her door-unless they're vampires, werewolves, or other supernatural beings. And nowsome of them aren't just friendly-they're family. When Sookie sees her brother Jason's eyes start to change, she knows he's about to turn into a were-panther for the first time-a transformation he embraces more readily than most shapeshifters she's known. But her concern for her brother becomes cold fear when a sniper sets his deadly sights on the local changeling population-and Jason's new panther brethren suspect he may be the shooter. Now, Sookie has until the next full moon to find out who's behind the attacks-unless the killer decides to find her first..."  In October Berkley Prime Crime will publish Charlaine's latest, Grave Sight, launching the new Harper Connelly series. Charlaine's novella, "Dancers in the Dark" will be published in by Harlequin in a three-in-one volume, Night's Edge with novellas by Barbara Hambly and Maggie Shayne. The novella takes place in the same world as the Sookie books, but features different characters in a fictional midwestern city. Also coming in October is the anthology Powers of Detection, edited by Dana Stabenow. Charlaine's contribution is a Sookie Stackhouse short story, "Fairy Dust." In January, a new Sookie Stackhouse short story, "One Word Answer," will be included in BITE, an anthology anchored by a Laurell K. Hamilton original short story.
	© 2005 Charlaine Harris Website Design by Dawn Fratini

This week's episode

July is using Shank's Mule today because Beanie has her Ford truck under the maple tree in his back yard.  He has the engine hoisted with a rope over a hugh limb and is positioning it into place under the hood.  He has it repaired and it only took two days. 

The walk from the vet clinic where she works as Doc Neil's only assistant is about a couple of blocks.  The town of Cherokee Rose is very small and rural and located on a plain in a valley in the Tellico Mountains.  The town consists of a few scattered buildings that are occupied by local businesses and others that make up the Court House and other public buildings.

After picking up her truck and arriving home July kicks off her shoes and sits on the front porch steps with Poochie, one of many assorted dogs that live with her and make up her family.  After a few minutes she goes into the house and makes a glass of iced tea and returns to the porch to sit in the swing and catch a breeze.  She's not there  long before CH, one of her very best friends comes driving up the long gravel driveway in a cloud of dust to her porch and joins her on the swing.

"Have you heard about Marlene?", he asks before he even gets seated.  July hasn't heard anything but immediately senses that this is not news she wants to hear and tenses but CH continues and tells her that The Poison Stalker has taken another victim.  "Marlene?" July asks unable to process this news for a moment.  CH pauses now and sits beside her on the swing. 

July wasn't close friends with Marlene but  knew her well enough for this to be very distrubing news.  All the victims have been well known by the citizens of the town where everyone knows everyone else.  It would be upsetting to hear news like this even if the victims were complete strangers but to know the women who have been the victims of The Poison Stalker is something that rattles all the people of this community, not just July.  This little mountain community has never been touched by anything like this before.

Marlene is the fifth woman to die and July knows the details of her death before CH or anyone else tells her.  The Stalker takes his victims in their homes.  He knows when they're alone.  There is never evidence of a break-in or a struggle.  Victims are raped and tortured before they are bitten by poisen snakes and allowed to die slow painful deaths.

July is afraid but her terror is beginning to turn to anger.

This sounds like a very worthwhile book from Neely Tucker. By reading this book we can get a better feeling of what aids is like in Africa that we couldn't get from reading news reports alone so I thought I would pass this along to others.   The following is from bookbrowse http://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm?book_number=1389   Book Jacket & Reviews
Browse a book excerpt and book reviews from Love in the Driest Season by Neely Tucker. Plus: an author biography, at BookBrowse.com.
Love in the Driest Season by Neely Tucker PaperBack: Apr 2005 Publication information	Reviews & Book jacket Read an excerpt Reader reviews Author biography (Tucker) Reading guide
From the JACKET Foreign correspondent Neely Tucker and his wife, Vita, arrived in Zimbabwe in 1997. After witnessing firsthand the devastating consequences of AIDS on the population, especially the children, the couple started volunteering at an orphanage that was desperately underfunded and short-staffed. One afternoon, a critically ill infant was brought to the orphanage from a village outside the city. She´d been left to die in a field on the day she was born, abandoned in the tall brown grass that covers the highlands of Zimbabwe in the dry season. After a near-death hospital stay, and under strict doctor´s orders, the ailing child was entrusted to the care of Tucker and Vita. Within weeks Chipo, the girl-child whose name means gift, would come to mean everything to them. Still an active correspondent, Tucker crisscrossed the continent, filing stories about the uprisings in the Congo, the civil war in Sierra Leone, and the postgenocidal conflict in Rwanda. He witnessed heartbreaking scenes of devastation and violence, steeling him further to take a personal role in helping anywhere he could. At home in Harare, Vita was nursing Chipo back to health. Soon she and Tucker decided to alter their lives forever-they would adopt Chipo. That decision challenged an unspoken social norm-that foreigners should never adopt Zimbabwean children. Raised in rural Mississippi in the sixties and seventies, Tucker was familiar with the mores associated with and dictated by race. His wife, a savvy black woman whose father escaped the Jim Crow South for a new life in the industrial North, would not be deterred in her resolve to welcome Chipo into their loving family. As if their situation wasn´t tenuous enough, Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe was stirring up national fervor against foreigners, especially journalists, abroad and at home. At its peak, his antagonizing branded all foreign journalists personae non grata. For Tucker, the only full-time American correspondent in Zimbabwe, the declaration was a direct threat to his life and his wife´s safety, and an ultimatum to their decision to adopt the child who had already become their only daughter. Against a background of war, terrorism, disease, and unbearable uncertainty about the future, Chipo´s story emerges as an inspiring testament to the miracles that love-and dogged determination-can sometimes achieve. Gripping, heartbreaking, and triumphant, this family memoir will resonate throughout the ages.

THE WONDERFUL TAR BABY STORY

"DIDN´T the fox never catch the rabbit, Uncle Remus?" asked the little boy the next evening. "He come mighty nigh it, honey, sho´s you born-Brer Fox did. One day atter Brer Rabbit fool ´im wid dat calamus root, Brer Fox went ter wuk en got ´im some tar, en mix it wid some turkentime, en fix up a contrapshun w´at he call a Tar-Baby, en he tuck dish yer Tar-Baby en he sot ´er in de big road, en den he lay off in de bushes fer to see what de news wuz gwine ter be. En he didn´t hatter wait long, nudder, kaze bimeby here come Brer Rabbit pacin´ down de road-lippity-clippity, clippity -lippity-dez ez sassy ez a jay-bird. Brer Fox, he lay low. Brer Rabbit come prancin´ ´long twel he spy de Tar-Baby, en den he fotch up on his behime legs like he wuz ´stonished. De Tar Baby, she sot dar, she did, en Brer Fox, he lay low. "´Mawnin´!´ sez Brer Rabbit, sezee-´nice wedder dis mawnin´,´ sezee. "Tar-Baby ain´t sayin´ nuthin´, en Brer Fox he lay low. "´How duz yo´ sym´tums seem ter segashuate?´ sez Brer Rabbit, sezee. "Brer Fox, he wink his eye slow, en lay low, en de Tar-Baby, she ain´t sayin´ nuthin´. "´How you come on, den? Is you deaf?´ sez Brer Rabbit, sezee. ´Kaze if you is, I kin holler louder,´ sezee. "Tar-Baby stay still, en Brer Fox, he lay low. "´You er stuck up, dat´s w´at you is,´ says Brer Rabbit, sezee, ´en I´m gwine ter kyore you, dat´s w´at I´m a gwine ter do,´ sezee. "Brer Fox, he sorter chuckle in his stummick, he did, but Tar-Baby ain´t sayin´ nothin´. "´I´m gwine ter larn you how ter talk ter ´spectubble folks ef hit´s de las´ ack,´ sez Brer Rabbit, sezee. ´Ef you don´t take off dat hat en tell me howdy, I´m gwine ter bus´ you wide open,´ sezee. "Tar-Baby stay still, en Brer Fox, he lay low. "Brer Rabbit keep on axin´ ´im, en de Tar-Baby, she keep on sayin´ nothin´, twel present´y Brer Rabbit draw back wid his fis´, he did, en blip he tuck ´er side er de head. Right dar´s whar he broke his merlasses jug. His fis´ stuck, en he can´t pull loose. De tar hilt ´im. But Tar-Baby, she stay still, en Brer Fox, he lay low. "´Ef you don´t lemme loose, I´ll knock you agin,´ sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, en wid dat he fotch ´er a wipe wid de udder han´, en dat stuck. Tar-Baby, she ain´y sayin´ nuthin´, en Brer Fox, he lay low. "´Tu´n me loose, fo´ I kick de natal stuffin´ outen you,´ sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, but de Tar-Baby, she ain´t sayin´ nuthin´. She des hilt on, en de Brer Rabbit lose de use er his feet in de same way. Brer