Living Witness

 

By Jane Haddam

A Gregor Demarkian Mystery

The folks of Snow Hill, a small Pennsylvania town in the foot hills of the Appalachian Mountains, are unhappy. After the recent school board election, the new members of the board are pushing a religious agenda centered around putting God back into the schools. It was a bit deceptive on the part of the new board members, who ran on a platform not of religious fundamentalism but on one of getting the new wing of the high school completed, which had been neglected for several years.  

The town is divided between the religious people and the progressive people, both sure the other side is stupid and wrong. Progressive people because they don't want religion taught to children in public schools. And religious people who believe progressives are trying to keep religion out of everything and sending the country straight to hell. 

The religious proponents want a sticker inserted in the science books that instructs readers to explore the idea of Intelligent Design by checking out a book that is available in the school library. The progressives are against the sticker being placed in science texts because Intelligent Design is not based on science or on facts. So the progressives get together and launch a lawsuit to stop the school board from putting nonscientific ideas in science text books. Things come to a head when one of the progressive plaintiffs of the lawsuit and a member of the school board, the leading and most venerable citizen of the town, ninety-one year-old Annie-Vic Hadley, is assaulted in her own home and beaten unconscious. 

Now Annie-Vic is in the hospital, unresponsive, and the town is in an uproar with progressives accusing the religious of being terrorists and murderers. And the religious accusing the progressives of trying to destroy the country with their godless agenda. Snow Hill police chief Gary Albright, who is known to be on the side of the religious crowd and thus a suspect in the assault, decides he needs outside help to investigate this crime. He calls in Gregor Demarkian, and ex-FBI agent who does freelance detective work to lead the investigation into the assault on Annie-Vic. But before Demarkian has barely got his investigation off the ground, two more progressives are attacked and beaten to death, both in Annie-Vic's vacant home, in the same place where she was assaulted. 

I enjoyed this story. The writing is quite engaging and it kept me interested even though it is much longer than I usually like reading, almost 400 pages long. I had never come across a Gregor Demarkian story before but it is a series of about 30 novels, first published in 1990 with Not a Creature Was Stirring. Living Witness was published in 2009. The author passed away in 2019. 

Publishers Weekly also has a review of this novel. As does Kirkus.