“DECENT PEOPLE” by De’Shawn Charles Winslow (Bloomsbury, 272 pages, $28).
Murder mysteries conventionally focus on a single question: Who did it? The best of the genre — such as De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s new novel “Decent People” — raise more philosophical issues. What is the value of human life? What kind of world do we live in? Is justice possible? In the case of West Mills, North Carolina, the setting for Winslow’s story, the most pressing question is both practical and existential: Should I stay, or should I go?
In the first chapter of “Decent People,” Josephine Wright, who left West Mills as a child, returns in 1976 after a long career in New York. Jo plans to marry her youthful sweetheart, Olympus “Lymp” Seymore, and settle in a cottage on the west side of a canal that divides the Black community from the all-white east. Her vision of serene, companionable days is scrambled when she learns that the Harmon siblings — Marian, Marva and Lazarus, friends of Jo’s youth — have been shot to death in their home. The Harmons returned to West Mills a decade earlier, after many years in the North, to establish Friendly Pediatrics, with Marian as physician, Marva as nurse and Laz as factotum. Worse, police have identified Lymp, the Harmons’ half-brother, as the prime suspect. It’s enough to make Jo question her decision to leave New York.
Not content to trust the investigation to the police, who are notoriously ineffectual in solving crimes against Black citizens, Jo begins to question witnesses and identify suspects. She wants to clear Lymp’s name — and to assure herself of his innocence — before she commits fully to him or the town. She suffered through two unsatisfying, childless marriages and wants simply to find some peace. West Mills may not be the pastoral idyll she craves.
Jo’s investigation reveals that clouds of suspicion hung over the Harmon siblings years before they were murdered. They accumulate enemies; rumors swirl regarding shady dealings at the medical practice and in their family home, the fanciest residence on the west side (a legacy from their father). Patients suspect Marian of insurance fraud, and the community questions why so many adults enter a pediatric clinic — might the Harmons be trading illicitly in drugs, as the police believe?