When one of the least liked dealers at the Tight as a Tick flea market is murdered, another dealer asks her visiting niece, Laura Fleming to investigate the murder. Most of the story takes place at the flea market and to be honest I had never thought of how much work could go into setting up booths there. Laura manages to investigate the suspects while helping her Aunt Maggie run her booth. She finds out that the victim liked to make trouble and ruin the business of fellow dealers. No one is mourning his lose. Her Shakespere-quoting husband is helping in the investigation but Richard is having problems of his own. He has bet a group of friends that he can stop quoting the Bard for three weeks.

I enjoy reading the Laura Fleming Mysteries since they are set in an area of the country that I'm familar with. Even though Byerly and Rocky Shoals are fictional, it isn't hard to recognize bits and pieces of local towns in those two towns. I'm seeing the familar in a different way then normal.

It's as much fun visiting Laura Fleming's hometown and meeting her relatives as it is trying to solve the mystery. That is what makes Ms. Kelner's mysteries so enjoyable. Her depiction of a North Carolina town is dead on, and this novel delves into the subculture of flea markets. While the novel is well written and well plotted (like Ms. Kelner's other work), it's the interesting characters that make this book a good read.

Every time Laura Fleming and her husband, Professor Richard Fleming, return to her hometown of Byerly, they always seem to get involved in a murder investigation. Laura has shown a knack for crime solving, so her Aunt Maggie asks her to investigate the murder of an acquaintance whose corpse was found at the TIGHT AS A TICK flower market. Out of their love for their relative, the couple begins to make inquiries even though they do not grasp their aunt's interest in the death of someone she loathed.

When Laura starts questioning the vendors about their relationships with the victim, she discovers that no one has a kind word to say about the deceased. When Maggie's table is trashed, Laura concludes that there is a connection between the vandalism and the homicide, both being done by insiders. Laura soon realizes that the killer will go to great lengths to obtain what he wants, including killing Maggie. It is up to Laura to identify him before he succeeds.

The Laura Fleming mysteries are some of the most whimsical and entertaining books on the market today. Toni L. P. Kelner captures the true meaning of community in a small southern town. Laura's literary quoting spouse adds comic relief as he serves as a counterpoint to the tension filled story line. They mystery is a mind challenger that is difficult to solve because of the long list of viable suspects. Mystery fans will have a jolly time with this well written charmer.

Harriet Klausner

To draw the most from this new book, you need to know already quite a bit about occupied France. The authors trace in detail academic perceptions of Vichy since 1945. Regime apologists tried to maintain in the 1950s that Petain had played a clever game in seeming to collaborate whilst plotting to maintain French independence. We now understand this was nonsense: Petain and Laval may have been interested in collaboration, but Hitler's only concern was booty. But equally in error was the Gaullist position that forty million Frenchmen supported the Resistance against a tiny number of traitors. The editors demonstrate that more recent research has shown how fragmented both the pro and anti Vichy groups were. For example, it was possible to be faithful to Petain whilst being anti nazi. Many ordinary French people, both in the cities and in the countryside, adopted an eclectic attitude according to "how the wind was blowing" in their area. The book suggests new lines for research on Vichy, especially a comparative approach with what was happening in other occupied countries such as Bulgaria and Hungary. The book is largely a tribute to Robert Paxton who wrote a ground breaking study of wartime France in the 1970s. This reviewer found the continuous adulation of Paxton, however merited, somewhat repetitive. You will enjoy this new volume if you really want to explore in depth the meaning of Vichy over the past sixty years. Given that France was still prosecuting men for war crimes in the late 1990s, Petain's regime is still a hotly debated topic in that country's academic establishment.

This book is an essential text for anyone interested in the history of of France during the Vichy regime. It offers a superlative compilation of the latest scholarship in the field, contributed by some of its most important writers, people like Michael Marrus, Jean-Pierre Azema, Henri Rousso, Stanley Hoffmann, Philippe Burrin, etc. etc. The introduction by Fishman and Smith is a thorough map of the entire contents of the book which, again, provides a rich collection of articles destined perhaps not for the general reader without any background on the subject, although the book itself is reader friendly....