Dovey Coe

Frances O'Roark Dowell's Dovey Coe came out in 2000, and it won the Edgar Award for best children's mystery the following year, as well as the William Allen White Children's Book Award.

Dovey is twelve, and she tells the whole story in the first person, explaining at the outset that she intends to lay the record straight about the death of her sister's suitor. She is a mountain girl, which is to say that she is used to being underestimated by people who think she is not clever.

Most of the book is about the relationship between her sister Caroline and the man who has been courting her, Parnell, and about the family and neighbours around them, and it includes her parents and her brother Amos, who cannot hear. Because Dovey is telling it, every character comes to the reader through her opinion of them, which is not always fair. The last part of the novel moves into a courtroom, where what she has been describing is finally argued over.