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Murder Stalks The Wakely Family is one of the August Derleth Judge Peck novels, with the Wisconsin small-town judge investigating a series of deaths in a prominent local family across several months. The Sac Prairie Saga material is the engine of the book, with Derleth's usual careful regional attention to the German and Polish family histories that he had been documenting for decades by the time of this entry.
Derleth handles the form with the kind of relaxed confidence the long-running regional writer has. The pace is slow. The character work is meticulous. The reveal is fair if not particularly ingenious.
Three stars. Recommended to readers of regional American crime fiction with serious commitment to a particular place. Derleth's Sac Prairie work is one of the underread peaks of mid-century American regional fiction.
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