A Little Lamb Lost

 

In the subgenre of amateur detectives, there seem to be no boundaries regarding a protagonist's vocation. Some tend to stretch credulity to its limits, but others, such as social work, provide the potential for a depth of material to mine. There haven't been many social worker sleuths in crime fiction, Irene Marcuse's Anita Servi series and Tom Schreck's Duffy Dombrowski, being two examples.

One of the most recent is the June debut novel by Margaret Fenton, Little Lamb Lost. From the "write what you know" school, Fenton, herself a child and family therapist, is married to a software developer in Birmingham, Alabama. In Little Lamb Lost, social worker Claire Conover gets drawn into a murder case after a child she recommended be returned to his reformed drug-addict mother is killed, allegedly by the mother. After the Department of Human Services and the press get wind of Claire's involvement, she tries to uncover the truth behind the boy's death and prove the mother innocent. Aided by a computer geek (and potential love interest -- see note above about the author's hubby), she pursues answers through the streets of Birmingham, identifying the child's child-abusing step-grandfather, a drug addict son of a rich area family and two boyfriends of the mother as potential suspects.

Fenton casts Conover as a sympathetic heroine, who honestly believes she can make a different in the world, despite the depressing life stories she's faced with on a daily basis and the troubled reality of the foster care system. Birmingham, Alabama, is also not a typical setting for a crime novel, with more opportunities for a fresh take on setting and sense of place. Publishers Weekly said in a review that "With her fine ear for regional speech, Fenton may do for Birmingham what Margaret Maron has done for rural North Carolina." (Speaking of Maron, the Women of Mystery are giving away a copy of her latest book, Sand Sharks. Click here.)

One interesting side note: Fenton has Anne George (who died in 2001) to thank for become a published author. As Fenton note, the pair "were on our way to a Sisters in Crime meeting one night and I was babbling on about Laura Lippman’s first book and how much I liked it when she said, 'Margaret, I don’t know why someone who loves mysteries as much as you do doesn’t try to write one.' I didn’t have a good answer for that. So the next day I started thinking about it. I am an LCSW and worked with child welfare for many years, so that seemed a good place to start."

Fenton is working on a sequel to the novel, titled Little Girl Gone, in what promises to become a new series.