If there's truly such a thing as an American "cozy,"Margaret Maron's novels of the contemporary South fit the bill. Not that DeborahKnott, the sexy, smart young district court judge whose extended family of 10siblings, a curmudgeonly father who used to be a moonshiner, anduncles, aunts, nephews, and nieces too numerous to count, bears anyresemblance to the maiden ladies of that beloved British genre. But like herEnglish counterparts, Maron eschews blood and gore, and concentratesinstead on manners, mores, and motives. And she has few equals on either sideof the Atlantic; she weaves telling portraits of ordinary people coping with out-of-the-ordinary circumstances, often in less thana couple of sentences, and tells the whole history of a landscape and a wayof life in one short paragraph. In this tradition, Home Fires delineates the remnants of prejudice that linger like an indeliblestain on the fabric of race relations in mostly rural Colleton County,North Carolina. When Deborah's family calls on her to help her teenagenephew, who's accused of vandalizing a family cemetery with racialepithets and hate slogans, she butts heads with an angry, aggressive, blackfemale D.A., a charismatic preacher, and an activist and former Black Pantherwhose closet full of skeletons seems linked to the church arsons. As theplot unfolds, Maron brings the New South into focus, illuminating notonly its physical beauty and the complexity of its inhabitants but also thechanges and problems caused by integration. Deborah is a steel magnoliawhose own fires smolder sexily in scenes with Kidd, her lover, and whose ownvalues and beliefs come in for a penetrating reexamination in this newestin the popular series from Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and MacavityAward-winning author Maron. --Jane Adams