Thank you, again, Kevin, for covering for me this week. Today, Kevin Tipple reviews The Queen City Detective Agency by Snowden Wright.

The Queen City Detective Agency: A Novel by Snowden Wright is set in
early 1985 in Meridian, Mississippi. Like an onion, this book is complicated
with many layers. Racism, classicism, the Dixie Mafia, and more play major
roles in this novel.

Turnip Coogan had been facing twenty to life for capital murder when he
decided to flee the jail. One of the trustees had left a window open, due to
the brutal heat, and Turnip decided to head on out that window. He forgot
that the jail was on the roof of the courthouse. Going out that window put
him outside on the roof of the building on this blistering hot January day.

Trapped on the roof with nowhere to run, his plight becomes a spectacle to
all, and a crowd gathers below in downtown Meridian, Mississippi. Known
to all as the “Queen’s City” things are on an economic downhill slide no
matter where you stand in the city. Being on the roof of the courthouse
makes it just a little more apparent.

Turnip is also on a downhill slide and he knows it. He knows he has been
put in this trap as he, and his well-known connections to the Dixie Mafia,
have been used against him. He is a desperate man, powerless against
what is happening, and pushed to the edge, literally and figuratively. It is no
surprise when he goes off the roof and dies seconds later as gravity
finishes the job started long ago.

It is just a few hours later when Leonora Coogan, mother of Lewis “Turnip”
Coogan, reaches out to Clemetine Baldwin, bi-racial owner of the Queen
City Detective Agency to get the people who killed her son.

The next day, she and her white partner, Dixon Hicks, drive to Lenora
Coogan’s trailer to discuss the situation. By now, everybody for 100 miles
around has seen the video of her son crashing to the sidewalk from the roof
of the courthouse. She strongly believes that he did not jump to his death.

She is sure he was killed because the Dixie Mafia wanted to silence him for
what he knew and might say as he faced a possible murder conviction.
While she doesn’t know specifics about what her son did for them, she is
sure he did some stuff and was important to them, and that they did not
want him talking about any of it.

While Clem knows that the Dixie Mafia is blamed for anything and
everything, she also knows that they sort of exist and are ruthless at times.
Mom had no idea what her son did for them and, honestly, did not want to
know as she got some good stuff out of his work. That pipeline is cutoff with
her son’s death so that factors in, without a doubt, on her request for help
now. But she is grieving and needs help, can pay, and despite her subtle
and not so subtle racism, Clem agrees to take the case. Afterall, the racism
is nothing new and Clem as decades of dealing with it as she was born and
raised here and what Lenora is saying is the usual stuff.

What follows is a complicated novel where some things, like allegiance to
the Confederacy, are proudly displayed, and other things, such as drug use
and sexual favors in the jail, are hidden from prying eyes. A complicated
crime fiction read, the case and those involved, go through a lot of twists
and turns in a book that is well worth your time.

One hopes that another book in this series is coming as this one was very
good and sets a strong foundation for a possible series.

My ARC reading copy came from the publisher, Harper Collins, through
NetGalley, with no expectation of a review.

Kevin R. Tipple ©2025