DECENT PEOPLE

A triple murder shocks a small North Carolina town into confronting its deepest fears and darker secrets lingering in the wake of the civil rights era.

Winslow follows up his widely praised debut, In West Mills (2019), by returning to the eponymous Southern locale of that multilayered romance with a murder mystery set in the mid-1970s. The story begins shortly after the bullet-riddled bodies of Dr. Marian Harmon, her sister, Marva, and brother, Lazarus, are discovered at the foot of the staircase of their home in the predominantly Black western section of West Mills. As readers of the earlier novel will recall, the hamlet is divided along racial lines by a small canal, and even after Jim Crow’s demise, the scars of racial segregation remain deep and raw. The town’s sheriff’s department regards their first homicide in decades as little more than a drug-related break-in, even after they interrogate, then release, the siblings’ half brother, Olympus “Lymp” Seymore, who was first suspected because of an argument he’d had with the three Harmons. Arrested or not, Lymp nonetheless walks around town with a taint of suspicion. And this deeply distresses Josephine Wright, a middle-aged native daughter of West Mills who has returned home after a 48-year stint in New York City to make a new life for herself with her childhood friend Lymp. Jo decides to remove any doubts about Lymp’s innocence by wandering around town asking who else might have a motive for murder. Is it Eunice Loving, who had taken her son La’Roy to Dr. Harmon to “have the gay removed” but was later horrified by the doctor’s violent methods? Is it Ted Temple, the town’s most prominent White real estate mogul, who was landlord for the Harmons’ home and, until a bitter dispute separated them, Marian’s secret lover? Or could it have been Ted’s daughter, Savannah, who more than a decade before had been ostracized by her father and exiled from the predominantly White part of town because she’d fallen in love with a Black man? Or could it have been Lymp after all? Jo isn’t sure of anything, but she proves a relentless and incisive sleuth, not just in pursuit of what happened, but in untangling the complex social dynamics within the seemingly bucolic rural Carolina hamlet. Though not as intricately woven as Winslow’s first novel, this tale comes across as considerably more than a regional whodunit because of its author’s humane and sensitive perceptions toward his characters, even those who may not deserve such equanimity.

A sequel that whets your appetite for another taste of life in West Mills.