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He's forty-eight, getting heavy, not having a good year as a San Francisco P.I. He's John Marshall Tanner. His general malaise drives him to return to his youth, in a manner of speaking and he attends his twenty-fifth college reunion. There, at a small midwestern liberal arts college, he encounters what many of us encounter at such events: an old love, old friends and buddies, old, lost dreams and old pranks. Tanner demonstrates again that you can't go home again, or to college reunions with any real degree of comfort. Tanner has a lingering belief that college was all right but not quite up to his expectations. Enter Seth Hartman, college buddy, prominent civil rights lawyer, former civil rights worker during the heady time of the marches and the registration drives. Hartman is now settled with a pretty good legal practice in Charleston, South Carolina. He's become the target of something called the Alliance for Southern Pride, a Nazi white supremacist knockoff., but no less paranoid and dangerous The Alliance has threatened Hartman's life and he wants Tanner to mosey into town and learn the identities of the Alliance members and in the process divert them from Hartman. To do that, Tanner has to draw Alliance members to himself, an action that becomes quite dangerous for the California snooper. There is only occasional high drama in this leisurely examination of Southern Society and its tattered fringes, but the tension rises steadily. Greenleaf gives us no new revelations regarding the War Between the States and its aftermath, but his writing, as always, is excellent, the characters are interesting, and this is a good novel. If you are unfamiliar with Greenleaf and Marsh Tanner, I would not recommend this novel, SOUTHERN CROSS, as your introduction. This one is for Tanner's steady fans. The reviewer is the author of: INNER PASSAGES A SUPERIOR MYSTERY http://www.Minnesotacrimewave.org
Reviewed by Carl Brookins, December 2002
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