A Minnesota man is shot during a reenactment of a minor skirmish of the Civil War in the woods of North Mississippi. Was it an accident? Or was it murder? And was the cop standing next to him the real target? Those questions send the former lover of the victim's wife (don't ask) on the hunt for the murderer, and perhaps a shot at revenge.

SOUTH OF SHILOH is what I classify as a airplane reading -- not high art, but a good way to pass the time when you have nothing else to do. And in this genre, SOUTH OF SHILOH sits squarely in the middle of the pack. It's a reasonably well written suspense novel that keeps the reader engaged and entertained through to the last page.

That being said, it does have some problems that prevent it from being great. The author's attempts to make Mississippi seem exotic and foreign fail just about completely. This may be because I'm a Southerner by birth, so I'll give the writer a pass on that one. He does make some grave mistakes, however, that I just can't let pass. The parts set in Minnesota are detailed to the point of distraction -- really, you can just say that she drives from one side of town to the other, you don't have to tell me which interstate she takes. I really don't care -- if I did, I'd use Google Maps. (A problem that John Grisham suffers from as well - some of his books read like a trip guide through Memphis.)

On the other end of things, he gets some basic things wrong in the South. I'm fine with portraying every Southerner as some kind of Confederacy-loving Yankee-hater - Lord knows there are enough of them, and I'm willing to cut the author some slack for trying to make Mississippi exotic and mysterious. But some errors cannot be forgiven, and destroy a lot of the author's credibility: No self-respecting Mississippian would offer someone a "soda". It's "coke," for the love of God. Getting the details right means the reader is sucked into the story. Getting them wrong, and the reader (well, at least this one, who may be a little sensitive on this subject being married to a North Dakotan) is never quite able to suspend his disbelief again.