Meet Sheriff Freddy

He’s “… so honest that he makes your teeth hurt.” That’s how Claire McClanahan once described him. He was also the object of Claire’s high school crush, when his silence made him seem dignified, mature, and mysterious. His body looks like a series of straight, flat surfaces connected at sharp angles, as if welded from steel plates. His face rarely changes. Freddy excited, Freddy mad, Freddy unhappy, he wears the same expression. The only known variations are a single left side dimple which appears when he is very, very happy and tensed jaw muscles when he is very, very angry. Freddy speaks only when necessary and his words typically range from annoying to infuriating.

Freddy, a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) School of Law in Oxford, gave up a piddling law practice to run for sheriff in the combined city-county government of Noon, Mississippi. To everyone’s surprise, a majority of St. Pierre County’s voters liked the idea of a prickly, flinty, honest-to-a-fault lawman who could give Gary Cooper and Cleavon Little a run for their money.

Blalock’s affection for Claire is obvious to everyone, except perhaps Claire herself. He often relies on Hugh’s police experience and Claire’s incisive reasoning to solve perplexing murder cases.