If there"s truly such a thing as an American "cozy," Margaret Maron"s novels of the contemporary South fit the bill. Not that Deborah Knott, the sexy, smart young district court judge whose extended family of 10 siblings, a curmudgeonly father who used to be a moonshiner, and uncles, aunts, nephews, and nieces too numerous to count, bears any resemblance to the maiden ladies of that beloved British genre. But like her English counterparts, Maron eschews blood and gore, and concentrates instead on manners, mores, and motives. And she has few equals on either side of the Atlantic; she weaves telling portraits of ordinary people coping with out-of-the-ordinary circumstances, often in less than a couple of sentences, and tells the whole history of a landscape and a way of life in one short paragraph. In this tradition, Home Fires delineates the remnants of prejudice that linger like an indelible stain on the fabric of race relations in mostly rural Colleton County, North Carolina. When Deborah"s family calls on her to help her teenage nephew, who"s accused of vandalizing a family cemetery with racial epithets and hate slogans, she butts heads with an angry, aggressive, black female D.A., a charismatic preacher, and an activist and former Black Panther whose closet full of skeletons seems linked to the church arsons. As the plot unfolds, Maron brings the New South into focus, illuminating not only its physical beauty and the complexity of its inhabitants but also the changes and problems caused by integration. Deborah is a steel magnolia whose own fires smolder sexily in scenes with Kidd, her lover, and whose own values and beliefs come in for a penetrating reexamination in this newest in the popular series from Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Award-winning author Maron. --Jane Adams