Book Review: A Gossiping Small Town Filled With Too Many “Decent People” | Lifestyle

It’s a small world, isn’t it?

Someone you know knows an ex-girlfriend of an old roommate who used to work in your building, but is now married to your aunt’s nanny brother in Tupelo. Yep, it’s complicated, and De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s new novel Decent People is twice as hard to untangle as he is.

Josephine Wright was around the block once or twice.

She was in her 60s, twice married and divorced, had affairs, but had never met a man like Olympus “Limp” Seymour. She could see into his heart and Limp was a good person. Yes, he can lose his temper, but he didn’t. He couldn’t kill his half-sister or half-brother, as people say.

It was 1976 and Joe had just moved to the small town of West Mills, North Carolina. She didn’t know many people there, but she was going to. bottom.

Eunice Loving should have kept her mouth shut.

But no, she had to go and argue with Dr. Marian Harmon, who said that Eunice’s son, Laroy’s idea of ​​treating him, had the boys of Savannah Russet beat him up. All Eunice wanted was to keep Laroy from being gay and Marian said she could fix him. Died. People said Limp did it, people liked to whisper.

The lovely blonde-haired Savannah Russet wanted to raise her sons in the town she grew up in, and her racist father never made it difficult. He thought Savannah’s mistake was falling in love with a black man. Having a child by his side was even worse. And Ted Temple wrote Savannah on his own accord.

But few knew the truth: Ted had slept with Marian Harmon for years…

At one point in this novel, author Deshawn Charles Winslow notes that the small town of Westmills is home to about 1,000 people.

I think I met everyone.

But here’s some help: never mind. “Decent People” is overpopulated, but it’s really mostly about a triple murder and a handful of characters, all of whom are detectives, any of whom could be a murderer. , this is not really a mystery novel. Although the story revolves around the murder of his three brothers, the whodunit seems secondary, as the finger pointing and crime-solving is largely done through gossip.

And Winslow’s characters love gossip.

Seeing small-town dynamics unfold with a touch of darker humor makes me wish the book never ended. It feels like disappointment not to.