Uncivil seasons

Michael Malone sets this comic novel in Hillston, a town in North Carolina's Piedmont region. Its residents like to think of their community as too mild and well-mannered to need specialists in murder. Malone draws a sharp contrast between a New South chasing high-tech living and an Old South bound by the unwritten rules it inherited, and he fills the story with a lively cast of characters.

When a death shakes that comfortable self-image, the town's pride and its old assumptions are tested. Malone is a Southern novelist whose work often turns a satirical eye on the social life of the region.