Potential to get better but...

Bootlegger's Daughter
by Margaret Maron

Loads of potential in this series...but  I didn't close the cover thinking I needed to run out and get the next book right away. Everything I'd expect to love--gutsy heroine lawyer who decides to run for judge despite her unfortunate family history. She's pulled into amateur detective work by a woman who wants to know who killed her mother and left her, as a baby, lying beside her dead mother on a barn floor.  A large number of interesting suspects but not so many I got overwhelmed.

So I don't know how it missed the mark for me. There wasn't much detail, for one.  Authors are advised to "show" the story and not "tell" the story, but too much show and not enough tell makes you feel like you're watching actors move around on a screen. Sometimes Hamlet needs to stop the action, to hold up a skull and recite the Alas, poor Yorick soliloquy.

While she hinted about an traumatic estrangement from her father, at one point he just started talking to her and she answered back and all of a sudden they were friends, with no explanation of what had gone down between them in the past. Their issues never seemed to go deeper than "he's a criminal and I'm an honest lawyer." There was a whole lot of missing backstory, there--I didn't want to have to make it up myself.

Other people liked the book; I'll try one more.