In the opening pages of Donna Tartt’s Little Friend, a Mississippi family gathers for a Mother’s Day feast and, before Mama can find “the good napkins,” one of the children dies in a horrible accident.

The story picks up again when Harriet, an infant at the time of the tragedy, is just old enough to ride her bike around town unaccompanied. And she’s mighty curious about how he died. Who, in all of Alexandria, Mississippi, committed this crime?

Harriet grows up in a broken family. After the tragedy, her mother retires to her bed, sick with headaches and other vaporous ailments. Her father tends to business in Nashville, never managing to check in at home. Harriet’s world is held together by the black maid in the kitchen, a set of great-aunties, and her best friend, a boy named Hely.

The maid chases away the undesirable children that stop by, looking for playmates.

The aunties — these ladies are my time-travel wish for this week. I’d like to peek in on the bunch of them, trying to get each other out the door for a lunch date. One, Harriet’s grandmother, is the practical one, who takes the photos; none of the others think they can manage something as complicated as a camera. Another makes a fool of herself flirting with an elderly dandy.

Hely follows Harriet wherever her ideas lead. He has “seen her jump off rooftops, attack kids twice her size, kick and bite the nurses during the five-in-one booster inoculations in kindergarten.

Throw in a white-trash family whose members run the gamut from preacher to jailbird. Add some snakes. Evidently Alexandria’s crawling with ‘em. A good many copperheads lie waiting in the weeds out in the newest, nicest subdivision. “Soon as there’s a flood too big for the Corps of Engineers to sandbag, you’re going to have every carpool mommy out there bit to pieces,” predicts Hely’s fast-talking, fast-driving teenage brother.

The author dwells a chapter or two too long on the white-trash crazies. (We already know they’re crazy.)

And not all the plot threads hang together.

But it’s a good enough tale to forgive the author’s misfires. I loved the characters, making their way through their hot and hopeless world. I shook with terror as Harriet and Hely risked their lives on adventure after adventure. Confess these capers to your parents when you’re twenty and you’ll be grounded all the way through grad school. Confess them when you’re fifty and their weak hearts will give out on the spot.