Deb Richardson-Moore
Lion Fiction, Oxford, England. 288 pages
Reviewed by Matt Matthews
Alberta Resnick’s crunchy peanut butter and banana sandwich is the perfect entrée into Deb Richardson-Moore’s delicious mystery, “The Cantaloupe Thief.” Resnick is dead after only one bite, of course, thanks to a perfectly placed steak knife, and the case goes cold for 10 years. But when our hero, Branigan Powers, sets out to write a news feature for the local paper on the anniversary of the sleepy Georgia town’s most famous murder, her questions jangle nerves in all quarters.
Branigan discovers nothing out of place in her investigation — until homeless people start getting run over on nocturnal, abandoned streets. And these people may have had some connection, however vague, to Mrs. Resnick’s unfortunate demise. A transient, after all, secretly squatting in Mrs. Resnick’s overgrown pool house was a suspect according to the ancient police report, but his alibi thoroughly checked out. Branigan thinks these unfortunate hit-and-runs suggest somebody knows something the police didn’t investigate a decade ago. It’s her only hunch, and she trusts her instinct long before she truly understands it.
An adopted teen whose homeless biological father drifts into his life, a mission pastor close to the streets, Branigan’s tightly knit family and lost brother, an amiable convention of psychics, a crusty editor named Tan4 who laments the death of the newspaper industry (not to mention his richest subscriber and distant cousin) and improbable new friendships with society’s castoffs living beneath the Garner Memorial Bridge conspire to spin this story — layer after layer — vividly to life.
Richardson-Moore writes with authority about things she knows and cares about. You can tell she is the real-life mission pastor who, as a force of nature, helped keep her beloved urban church, Triune Mercy Center on the outskirts of downtown Greenville, South Carolina, from closing a decade ago. (Her memoir, “The Weight of Mercy: A Novice Pastor on the Streets,” is a must-read for anyone attempting urban ministry.) The invisible homeless she writes about in this story are not invisible to her. And while Richardson-Moore as both mystery writer and street-smart pastor, she doesn’t pretend to understand all the threads that make up her parishioners’ complicated tangle, and she doesn’t dare to tie-up life on the streets into some unlikely or politically correct neat bow. Life on her pages — like in her mission church — is messy.
For the reader, that’s a gift. Always darkening the faces of her complex characters is the capriciousness of mental illness, the wear and tear of living in the elements and the hungering need for the next fix. Richardson-Moore makes the ever-present pangs and compulsions of addiction ring like Coltrane. Branigan will come to know the petty crime and wrenching shame homelessness spawns. Being homeless wasn’t illegal, Richardson-Moore writes, but being human and doing human things outside was. As exquisitely as they know how, Branigan’s homeless neighbors are just trying to stay alive on the side streets tent villages, and mission church only steps away from the groomed storefronts on First and Main. New South or Old, this is the American South that native Branigan Powers is seeing for the first time.
And this is the world she will change.
Matt Matthews is the pastor of St. Giles Presbyterian Church in Greenville, South Carolina.
