The Wrong Good Deed

Clemmie and Muffin, friends in an active senior community (it’s not a retirement home!) are attending church together, content in their matching jackets and cozy friendship. Then Clemmie spots someone she knows from the past and is terrified and desperate to get out NOW. In flashbacks to the 1960s, when Clemmie was married to a man from their small South Carolina town’s most prominent family, we find her in a quandary. The men in her husband’s family are violent racists, but she’s too afraid of them to do anything about it…until she must take action and then run away forever. In the present, things are heating up as a white reporter makes an incendiary claim about something that happened to him in the town and a Black resident wants answers on her nephew’s disappearance. Then there’s a death among the seniors and history can’t be swept under the rug any more. This is a compelling read on many levels. The senior community’s friendship, backbiting, and the everyday indignities of growing “less active” are portrayed with wry accuracy by Cooney; Muffin’s disdain for Clemmie’s casual racism is a highlight. The author raises important questions: Can people really change? What is the responsibility of the bystanders to a crime? How can small-town residents from opposite sides of the fight for Civil Rights deal with one another today? For those who like a controversial mystery and fans of Richard Osman’s retirement-community-set The Thursday Murder Club.