Murder in Mayberry

By Mary Kinney Branson and Jack Branson
The Berkley Publishing Group, $7.99, 301 pages

Told from the first person, Murder in Mayberry is a true-crime novel recapping the murder of Ann Branson, the beloved aunt of authors Mary Kinney Branson and Jack Branson. Bludgeoned to death and stabbed ninety-seven times, Ann’s horrific death inspired the authors to vow to bring her killer to justice.

Jack, a retired federal agent, and Mary, the primary author and retired marketing director, chronicled their journey through the painstaking investigation, the arrest of a suspect, and the subsequent trial. In several spots throughout the book, Kinney Branson zealously oversells her grief with lines like, “…he drew the last remaining fragments of patients from his exhausted psyche and shared them with me, like a parent in a concentration camp giving his last bread crumb to his child.” It seems a bit over-the-top to equate mental fatigue to the holocaust. However, the book works elsewhere; it is made up of sixty-eight short and concise chapters that rarely drone on for longer than four or five pages. An easy read, though the details of this “real-life” murder are difficult to imagine taking place, especially in a small Kentucky town.

Reviewed by Joe Kopaczynski