I Shall Not Want by Julia Spencer-Fleming

Still the hymn theme - although I am having a little more trouble tying this one to the story. Actually, the title is not a line in the version that is in the book. She used the Isaac Watts version, "My shepherd shall supply my need" which I do like very much, but it does not include the line "I shall not want" which, of course, is from the King James.

The story circles around Mexican illegals in upstate New York. Rather odd, I never thought of them going that far, but I shall assume that Spencer-Fleming did her research. Around here a story about illegals would probably focus on coyotes and abuses of that sort. This is about drug smuggling and Mexican gangs and the New York version of inbred poor white trash - only not so poor.

Clare trashes yet another car. Russ gets over Linda's death. Russ and Claire finally manage to get to bed - honestly, Spencer-Fleming must have been running out of interruptions. She does throw a big one at the end, though. Russ is recovering after being shot and dying - in the prologue - making most of the book a flashback - down to the point where he didn't actually die after all. They have agreed that they can't live without each other - and her guard unit is deployed to Iraq. Remember, she joined the guard at the end of the one before this one - and went back flying helicopters, not as a chaplain.

This one also included what I think is my favorite scene in the entire series so far. These, as you may have gathered, are not cheerful goofy mysteries, they tend to be downright grim. And the events surrounding this scene are just as grim as one would expect - but the Mexican bad guys, in the attempt to recover the truckload (BIG truck load) of pot which the white trash had stolen, set fire to the barn in which the other bad guys are hiding. In addition to the local bad guys and the not so innocent girl and the Mexican laborer who is trying to save her from her family, the barn contains - have you guessed? - the pot, of course. So all this is enacted while all participants, including Clare and a couple of Millers Kill police officers, are as high as proverbial kites.