Everything you need to understand or teach No Future for Luana by August Derleth.
Like the Sac Prairie books, this mystery is set in Sac Prairie, an earthly version of Eden. Only the perpetrators of crimes and the victims of those crimes mar an otherwise healthy and vigorous plantation of good country people. The wise detective, Judge Peck, is there to restore the Edenic paradise.
In No Future for Luana, Sac Prairie is made up of good people; the bad ones, Luana for instance, leave home never realizing that it is paradise. When they return, if they are contrite, they may rejoin the community. But, if they return as Luana did, to rob the community further, they die justifiably.
While in other Judge Peck mysteries the judge's particular legal knowledge aids him in solving the mystery and, more important, in bringing the correct suspect to justice, in No Future for Luana the judge makes his deductions based on his personal shrewdness and...