“Little White Lies” is the third in Fenton’s series, a “Social Worker Claire Conover Mystery.” Margaret Fenton, not surprisingly, had a ten-year career as child and family therapist for the Jefferson Country child welfare department. I had not read numbers one and two, so I took a look.
In book #1, a presumably recovering drug addict named Ashley, with Claire’s help, regained custody of her son Michael, and Michael turned up dead. Did the mother kill her son? In book #2 a woman involved in illegal gambling in Birmingham is killed. Is her homeless 13-year-old daughter the killer? If these suspects were in fact guilty, these would be stories out of classical Greek tragedy.
This story opens with the lines: “Bombingham. That’s what everyone called my beloved city of Birmingham, Alabama in the middle of the last century, when somewhere around fifty bombings happened between 1947 and 1965….,” and the action begins with a bombing at the offices of Dr. Marcus Freedman, a professor of political science at UAB and a black mayoral candidate. Freedman had, of course, been getting nasty racist death threats, no real surprise there, but he wasn’t at the office at the time and the bomb killed a white volunteer, a fine young man named Jason O’Dell. Was this bad luck or was O’Dell possibly the target? O’Dell’s African-American wife, a drug addict, had recently died, leaving him with an infant daughter, Maddie. Claire will now have to find a home for Maddie.
Right off the bat, then, the novel takes up infant placement, racial strife, interracial marriage, drug abuse and political violence. Not much is left out. At this same time, Claire has to deal with the case of LaReesa, a homeless African-American 13-year-old whose mother, a drug addict is, incarcerated. LaReesa, a drug user herself, has been homeless, and has been turning tricks to survive on the streets of Birmingham. Claire decides, impetuously, to take in this surly, unpleasant girl and does so without even telling her live-in partner, Grant, a fine fellow, who understandably wishes he had been consulted. Claire, it seems to me, would receive a low grade in relationship communications. This does not bode well.
There must be investigation to learn if infant Maddie has any living relatives, and Claire Conover joins forces with the hot, ace News reporter, Kirk Mahoney. They follow clues, travel all over Birmingham and a lot of Shelby County, and local readers will enjoy reading of Bluff Park, South Side, Pinson, and so on. In a novel, place names are always comforting. They speak with a rich couple in Mountain Brook. He just seems arrogant and unpleasant, but the wife, seriously cowed and subdued, is wearing baggy clothes: Claire identifies her as abused.
There is also some investigation into several local mining disasters. The greedy owner had ignored safety violations and men were killed. In only a few days, Claire and Kirk, who have grown obviously close, have discovered the bomber’s identity, but like Hercule Poirot in “Murder on the Orient Express,” adhering to some code of higher ethics, they promise not to reveal his identity. So, the novel is about racism, a deadly bombing, drug addiction, spouse abuse, love and infidelity, investigative reporting, the ins and outs of foster care and adoption proceedings, all in 162 pages.
