I love the South.
Perhaps because I was born and raised in Chicago, I always found the South to be a place of mystery and romance. The best part of the years we spent traveling the country was the chance to explore so many of its different areas. As volunteers in Big Bend National Park in Texas, we watched a blue norther turn the sky to the color of dark bruises before we were chilled to the bone in the ensuing storm. One New Years' Eve we watched the fireworks over the French Quarter from the other side of the Mississippi and discovered no-see-ums in Orlando in February. Ate fresh shrimp in Panama City when upwind from the paper mills.
Over the years I began to pick up distinct regional accents. People from Alabama speak differently from those in North Carolina. Texans differ from Oklahomans, and Arkansans. The dialect in central Florida sounded lighter and brighter than that spoken in North Georgia. I screwed up badly once though, when I suggested that a friend was from North Carolina. He puffed out his chest and said, "I ain't no damn Yankee, I'm from SOUTH Carolina!"
It seemed that a large segment of the USMC Officer Corps consisted of Southerners and so we had many friends in the region. One year we met up with Marine Corps friends who were in the minority, being from Maine, near Beaufort, South Carolina. George and Mary were spending the winter in a condo on one of the coastal islands and we were stopping at the Marine Corps Air Station in Beaufort. I loved the low country, though I could have done without all of the bugs, even during the winter. We attended a graduation at Parris Island and walked over the sand dunes on the coast. Had great meals at local eateries and lots of laughter before moving on up the coast to Charleston. I can close my eyes and still smell the salt air and see the endless expanse of low lying green islands from the highway.
C. Hope Clark brought it all back for me in her stories of Carolina Slade, USDA employee.
When I picked up
Lowcountry Bribe, I was unaware of
C. Hope Clark's blog, or her website and newsletter,
FundsforWriters. I had actually never heard of her, but her second novel was on sale at Amazon, looked interesting, and so I decided to pay full price to read (listen) to the first one. Both novels had plenty of five star reviews at Barnes & Noble, Amazon and Goodreads.
C. Hope Clark took early retirement from the the United States Department of Agriculture about ten years ago to devote herself to writing full-time. She has lately turned to mystery novels based on the adventures of an employee of the same agency, and is able to add that extra note of authenticity to the character. After 25 years with the USDA, Clark knows what she is writing about.
Hope is married to a 30-year veteran of federal law enforcement, a Senior Special Agent, now a contract investigator. They met on a bribery investigation within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the basis for the opening scene to Lowcountry Bribe. Hope and her special agent live on the rural banks of Lake Murray outside of Chapin, South Carolina, forever spinning tales on their back porch, bourbon and coke in hand, when not tending a loveable flock of Orpington and Dominiquer hens.
- CHopeClark.com
She created and maintains a website for writers, FundsforWriters, and publishes weekly newsletters. What differentiates her website from the hundreds of other websites for writers is that it isn't about how to write, but about how to make money from what you write:
Other websites provide guidance on how to write, how to query, how to format manuscripts, and so on. We give you direction on the funding streams. We focus on markets, competitions, awards, grants, publishers, agents, and jobs for your writing abilities, with motivation chucked in.
Writers Digest has included FundsforWriters as one of its 101 Best Websites for Writers for the last 13 years so I imagine it has benefited quite a few writers. Unfortunately, her very prominence among writers caused me to view the many five star reviews of her books with a slightly jaundiced eye. After all, how objective can a fellow writer be? Surprisingly objective, as it turns out. While I may not have gone five stars on the first one, the second was pretty close.
Lowcountry Bribe
By C. Hope Clark
Published by Bell Bridge Books
February 2012
272 Pages
I found something highly intriguing about a main protagonist who works as a County Manager for the USDA. I admit that much of its appeal was that she wasn't a cop or a coroner or crook or private investigator. She spent her days managing an office and finding ways to obtain money for farmers to borrow so that they could remain on their land. Hardly the setting for derring-do.
But then I remembered a certain agency out west, that found itself making headlines with news of parties and cocaine and microwaves that were shared between agency employees and those they were supposed to be regulating. Hmm, I thought, what mysteries might lie within the government offices of a loan agent? Embezzlement, extortion, bribery? I found a lot more than white collar crimes in a novel that opened with this as its first sentence:
O-positive primer wasn’t quite the color I had in mind for the small office, but Lucas Sherwood hadn’t given the decor a second thought when he blew out the left side of his head with a .45.
The narrator is Carolina Slade Bridges, who bristles at the use of her husband's name, reserves the use of her given name for her parents, and goes by Slade. She replaced her old boss who disappeared a year earlier, as County Manager of the Charleston County, South Carolina office. Still missing her mentor, she now must deal with the suicide of a co-worker, Lucas Sherwood, the man she relied on to inspect property and do evaluations.
Within days of the suicide, a hog farmer offers her a $10,000 bribe to help him obtain additional property, right after he had shown her the dead bodies of the hogs that prevented him from repaying his existing loan on a timely basis. Unsure if the offer was serious, she reported it to her superiors.
Senior Special Agent Wayne Largo and his partner show up from the Atlanta Office of the Inspector General to plan a sting in hopes of getting the farmer to repeat his offer on tape. When that attempt fails, the agents are recalled, the tables are turned and Slade finds herself suspected of soliciting the bribe.
Meanwhile, her home life is a mess, with a passive-aggressive, soon to be ex, husband who belittles her every achievement and makes her juggling act as an employee, a mother of two young children and a wife far more difficult than it needs to be.
And now the agents who were supporting her in her efforts are gone, leaving her to face the internal affairs interrogation. To say nothing of the anger of the hog farmer who now knows she blew the whistle on him. Alone, she must protect herself and her children while finding a way to prove her innocence and keep her job.
Carolina Slade is what a Louisiana friend of mine would call "a piece of work." Complicated, controlling, prickly, stubborn, difficult to get along with but also smart, loyal, honest and capable of being simply charming. Wayne Largo is more of a cypher, accustomed to being in charge and giving orders, Slade's stubborn independence clearly drives him crazy while the rest of her just kind of drives him crazy.
Interesting characters, complicated plot and lovely setting, but I still had a few reservations. The bribery investigation resonated most strongly with me, Slade's reaction to going from an honest, upfront employee to a suspect, included realistic feelings of confusion, betrayal, anger and fear. It felt honest and authentic. Some of the later action felt just a little bit over the top and strained, but did not quite fracture credulity. The author remained honest with the reader, the clues are presented throughout the book and not shoehorned in at the very end. Overall I liked it enough to give the second one a try.
Tidewater Murder
By C. Hope Clark
Published by Bell Bridge Books
April 18, 2013
290 Pages
Six months after the action in Lowcountry Bribe, Slade finds herself promoted to a new job in the Columbia, SC, regional headquarters.
The Office of the Inspector General served as the federal agents for most agencies, including the Department of Agriculture. Our OIG, ever read to jump in at Dubose’s request, considered my job as Special Projects Representative a milk-toast version of a real agent, often times not taking me seriously. Six weeks’ training and a badge stated I possessed the authority to snoop only until the stink turned pungently criminal.
In the middle of a DIY move from a temporary apartment in Columbia, to her new home on Lake Murray, shortly after picking up her son whose behavior has gotten him kicked out of Bible School, a thunderstorm hits, a twister deposits a jet ski atop her rental truck, and she receives a phone call from a fellow auditor working in the Beaufort, SC office reporting a major discrepancy in the loan documents of a tomato farmer.
The Beaufort office is run by her old, if not only, close friend, Savannah Conroy, known as Savvy.
She’d indoctrinated me as a young hire, teaching me how to be a woman banker amidst the testosterone-driven boys of agriculture. She’d put my shattered pieces back together after an attempted rape. She jumped when I needed her and taught me to laugh when I wanted to cry.
The opening paragraph of the novel, another gem, describes Savvy:
Savannah Conroy was one of the sharpest rural loan managers the Department of Agriculture had: she slung attitude like paint on a canvas, wore sweaters like a Hollywood starlet, and managed an office like Steve Jobs. They’d built the Beaufort, South Carolina, office around her to harness that charisma, and then added two more counties to keep her busy.
Slade's stubborn loyalty, and her need to protect those she cares about, compels her to ignore the clear conflict of interest and assign herself to Savvy's case. She wrangles a few days from her boss, State Director Dubose, deposits her son with her parents, her daughter with the neighbors across the street and heads for Beaufort.
As a Special Project Representative, she is supposed to restrict her activities to administrative investigations, no guns or high speed chases. Any danger is supposed to be handled by the agents who are trained to do so, like Wayne Largo. Who is once again plagued by Slade's tendency to follow a lead until it traps her in some god-forsaken predicament where there is no cell coverage but lots of spiders and bad guys.
The loan documents in question appear to contain a forged signature from a tomato farmer who promptly turns up dead once Slade gets to Beaufort. Her dear friend Savvy has reunited with the creepy boyfriend that Slade has never trusted, and is proving to be difficult for Slade to reach. Savvy, unaccustomed to being a suspect is defensive, and Slade, unused to investigating a close friend is becoming clumsy.
Meanwhile, a co-worker reveals to Slade his romantic interest in her while she and Wayne are experiencing one of their heated disagreements. And the investigation into forged loan documents leads, of course, into drugs, slaves and murder.
In this, the second of the series, Clark has comfortably, confidently settled into her storytelling mode and weaves a compelling mystery. Slade's children grow into their roles and provide depth to Slade's character and compound her multiple responsibilities. The personal relationship between Slade and Wayne Largo deepens while stumbling over the conflict inherent in their working relationship. And there is something very cool about a federal employee as a superhero, even if imperfect.
On top of all of that, South Carolina shines brightly in every scene. You can feel the density of the summer humidity and hear the cicadas in the evening. I do love armchair travel that allows me to visit such a beautiful part of the country without the hassle of a 50 pound baggage weight limit. I look forward to my next visit, just as soon as C. Hope Clark writes another story.
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