Stone Maidens

Discuss Richards’s use of the red herring device to mislead the reader into believing that David Claremont is the killer. How does Richards structure his progressive reveal to maintain the momentum of his plot?

At what point did you figure out that David Claremont was not the killer? What clues helped you? How do Richards’s choices reflect general genre conventions, and does he deviate from them at all?

What impact does the romantic subplot between Prusik and Sheriff McFaron have on the novel’s central plot? How does their relationship inform the novel’s thematic exploration of Gendered Prejudice in Law Enforcement?