This is an easy read(I read it in 2 days). Carolina Slade is a US Dept of Agriculture loan office manager, in Charleston County, South Carolina. She is holding down a full time job, parenting two children and married to a verbally abusive husband. She is offered a bribe by a farmer having difficulty ...more

I started Lowcountry Bribe thinking it was a cozy. (I write action/suspense stuff. Cozies don't usually grab my attention.)

However ... BAM! Carolina Slade hides no flaws and pulls no punches on her way to bringing down a bad guy. Okay, there was a little romantic suspense and some kissing along the ...more

With Lowcountry Bribe, Hope Clark has proven herself a master storyteller. With her experience as a writer and former fed, she shines in understanding and then weaving this tale of bribery in government and the havoc it creates. She's created an interesting character and heroine in Carolina Slade, a ...more

First person narration is tricky business. To begin with, you forfeit the ability to view actions from multiple points of view. You cannot, for example, write about a lurking intruder, hidden behind the drapes, if your narrator doesn't know he (or she) is there, so you don't get to apply that sort ...more

I know C. Hope Clark as the Funds for Writers lady. I had no idea she spent many years working for the Department of Agriculture in South Carolina, which gave her the background for this book, which she bills as the first in the Carolina Slade mystery series. If the USDA is really this crooked, God ...more

Carolina Slade Bridges, known as "Slade" is a woman who is not one to be trifled with. She is smart, efficient, and capable of handling whatever comes her way. Yet, she is caught in a loveless marriage of twelve years duration, with each is trying to out wait the other as to who files for divorce f ...more

I loved this mystery and all the local connections to SC. I wish it had page numbers because I always plan my reading out by page numbers. I can’t wait to read the next one in this series. ...more

Slade lives with a man she hates for 12 years. Hmmm. It is one thing for a marriage to be unhappy or dull or failing, but to put up with the arguments and hateful sarcasm and continue to sleep in the same bed when she hates him for 12 years? Parts of the story were interesting, but the parts about a ...more

Authors often ask "What if" when they have an idea for a plot. When C. Hope Clark first thought about a civil servant at the Department of Agriculture reporting an attempted bribe by a farmer, she must have asked "what's the worst that can possibly happen?"

Carolina Slade (and you don't call her "Car ...more

Rules were absolute; that’s the way she was raised. If she followed the rules, she’d be just fine…

Uh-uh, honey. Not this time. Not for Carolina Slade, County Manager, United States Department of Agriculture. Slade's professional life has blitzed from the structured normalcy of bailing out farmers w ...more