Do Unto Others

Do Unto Others is the 1994 debut that won Jeff Abbott the Agatha and Macavity awards (and an Edgar nomination), and it announced what was going to be a long career. Jordan Poteet is a Boston transplant working as the library director in his small Texas hometown, dealing with a school-board push to remove certain books from the shelves. When the board president turns up dead in the library after the latest meeting, Jordan is the obvious suspect.

The pleasures of the book are mostly small-town pleasures: Jordan's mother's Alzheimer's and the way the town treats her, the politics of the library board, the way every conversation in the diner has three other people listening in. Abbott writes the social fabric of small-town Texas with a precision that does not turn into cuteness, which is harder than it sounds.

The mystery itself resolves fairly, and the censorship subplot is handled with more nuance than I expected. Four stars. A clean debut and an early entry from a writer who got significantly more ambitious later.