THE PATRON SAINT OF RED CHEVYS

Part quirky coming-of-age story, part murder mystery, this debut tracks the efforts of a Mississippi girl to deal with her mother's sudden death. Jubilee Starling is in junior high when her mother, flamboyant, free-spirited Bernice Starling, a blues and jazz singer, is found stabbed to death in her truck. The most likely suspect is Levi Litvak, the handsome local weatherman who also happens to be Bernice's lover, but when Litvak dies right after the murder in a car accident, the case goes cold. Sloan turns her attention to her young protagonist, penning a series of heartfelt but somewhat lifeless scenes that strive to capture local color, including a class field trip to a prison, a freak show at the county fair and a tornado that briefly touches down in the small Gulf Coast town. The novel gains momentum when Jubilee earns a scholarship to Berkeley and Sloan chronicles her cross-country drive to college with her father. Those passages and the initial college scenes resonate with an emotional poignance that is missing from much of the Gulf Coast material, although the resolution to the murder subplot turns out to be anticlimactic. Sloan shows flashes of talent, but this is an uneven first novel. Agent, Martin Shepard. (July)