For a century we have known that you don’t have to be on the police force, or even a private consulting detective like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, to get into crime solving.
In American fiction, it is most common for lawyers, starting perhaps with Perry Mason, to get involved, but clergy, professionally concerned with good and evil, also figure large in sleuthing: we have Father Brown, Sister Boniface and the Rabbi of “On Friday the Rabbi Slept Late.” There is even a series in which the detective is an antique furniture dealer. Anyone can do it.
Fenton’s novels, featuring a social worker, are closer to police procedurals than you might think. Claire Conover is an investigative social worker in Birmingham. Her job often puts her in touch with real unpleasantness: child abuse, spouse abuse, addiction, kidnapping, domestic problems from the distasteful to the deadly. Social work is only a half step removed from the criminal justice system.
Conover is generous but can also be impetuous. In the third book of this series, she was in a solid relationship with a fine man, Grant Summerville, “six foot five with loose brown curls,” but unwisely “in a moment of total stupidity,” cheats on him with newspaper reporter Kirk Mahoney. When this volume opens, she is regretting that grotesque error in judgment, and the reader is happy to learn that Grant cares for her and is forgiving.
Now, through bigheartedness, Claire is fostering a thirteen-year-old Black teenage waif, LaReesa, whose mother, Amara, a prostitute and drug addict, has just been released from Tutwiler Prison in Wetumpka. LaReesa herself has been trafficked as a prostitute. Amara surfaces, wanting back her parental rights, and then Grant is accused of sexual misconduct by a former employee, Regina Maynard, whom he had fired because she was stealing from him and several of his clients.
Although expressly forbidden, because of her involvement with Grant, Claire works to clear Grant’s name while simultaneously dealing with LaReesa’s crazed mother. Investigating Regina Maynard proves fascinating because the woman who accused Grant of sexual misconduct is, it seems, a hyperactive temptress, having seduced many fairly naïve men along the way, including her high-school science teacher. Then she is murdered.
Besides dealing with these two big personal issues, Claire has to put in a regular day’s work. One of her teen-age clients tries to kill himself by cutting his wrists with a steak knife. She interviews new clients, arranges inspection visits and evaluations, carries clients with no transportation from one meeting to another, and appears to testify in various venues.
This novel is not all meetings, however. There is a car crash, even a car bomb. Claire and the action of this novel move around Jefferson County at a high rate of speed. Being a social worker in Birmingham is clearly an exhausting business.
