Three-Day Town

Three-Day Town
Margaret Maron
Grand Central Publishing
Hatchette Book Group
Hardcover
November 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-55578-4
288 pages
$ 25.99

If you are a working judge and your husband is a sheriff deputy, finding time for a honeymoon can be difficult. They have not succeeded in finding time for a honeymoon in their first year of marriage.

For Judge Deborah Knott and Sheriff’s Deputy Dwight Bryant the opportunity came when Dwight’s sister-in-law offered to let them stay for a week in her New York City apartment in the Upper West Side. Who could turn that down?

Deborah’s grandmother has asked that she deliver a package to a distant cousin while in New York. She immediately called her cousin, Sigrid, who was puzzled by the idea of the package and asked Deborah to open it. How do you delicately and accurately describe a piece of sculpture that is extremely obscene and politically incorrect? Not in any hurry, the two agree to meet at the next-door apartment where there is a party that night.

When the elusive cousin, Sigrid Harold, who is also a NYPD lieutenant, attempts to pick up the package, it is missing. Unfortunately, the building superintendent is also sprawled out dead in the doorway.

Three-Day Town is a realistic novel with the crime being solved as you read each page. The characters are very believable.
If you are daily involved with law enforcement and are away from where you work but are in the middle of a crime, wouldn’t it make sense to just team up with the local authorities if they allow it?
Three-Day Town is superb with establishing the setting. Ms. Maron takes into account the lifestyle with the groceries, transportation, life in an apartment, snow, garbage, doormen, etc… that are so much of the everyday life in present day New York City. These details are what everyone loves when they read a Deborah Knott novel.
Margaret Maron is a native of North Carolina and has also lived in Brooklyn. Being that this is the seventeenth book in this series, it amazes me that each novel can be read as a standalone but has enough character development to keep the story interesting and the series invigorating. I am also wondering if Ms. Maron is going to spin-off the Deborah Knott series and begins the Sigrid series. So many questions that were not answered would be perfect for future novels.
Three-Day Town is a perfect quick read during a snowstorm provided that you have no erotic art sculpture.