BONES TO PICK
by Carolyn Haines
When a tell-all author is murdered, suspects can be found in every chapter of her book.
Who killed Quentin McGee? When her life partner, Allison Tatum, is arrested, Allison’s brother Humphrey calls on private-eye Sarah Booth Delaney, Daddy’s Girl extraordinaire, to tow her to safe harbor. Sarah Booth and her high-fashion partner Tinkie (Hallowed Bones, 2004, etc.) find that Quentin and Allison, graduates of the Carrington School for Well-Bred Ladies, have trashed the reputation of dozens of local families. Their investigation unearths a trail of threatening letters and a string of accidents that now look like murder. Sarah Booth pauses in her sleuthing just long enough to get advice on her unhappy love life from the family ghost; receive a string of playfully sexy gifts from Humphrey; and try talking Tinkie into having a biopsy on the lump in her breast. Clearly, a serial killer is warning and then killing Carrington School alumnae who are falling short of the ideal of southern womanhood. Sarah Booth and Tinkie race around the Mississippi Delta until the clues lead them to a killer who nearly adds them to the list before they’re rescued by Sarah Booth’s love, Sheriff Coleman Peters, along with Tinkie’s husband, Oscar, and the still smitten Humphrey.
Stephanie Plum meets the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Non-southerners will find the madcap adventure an informative peek into an alien culture.