Comfort, southern style: A healing touch, gossip and beignets with chums, and a ghost in flapper garb giving lessons in romance to a private eye in need of a pedicure.
Sarah Booth Delaney and her lifelong friend Tinkie, now ensconced in their newly decorated office in Zinnia, Mississippi, are hired by a New Orleans nun to prove that stunning Doreen Mallory, a natural healer and good soul, didn’t murder her badly malformed infant daughter Rebekah. Of course, she didn’t. She’s been too busy offering her special brand of divine love to financial right-hand man Michael Anderson, lapsed healer/con artist/televangelist Oren Weaver, and very married senator Thaddeus Clay—any of whom might be Rebekah’s daddy, and sorry about it. So Sarah Booth, Tinkie, and tagalong Cece, gossip columnist extraordinaire, head for New Orleans. Soon they dig up lots of dirt: the senator’s luscious wife is a transsexual; the preacher is paying people to claim he healed them; the right-hand man has made some mighty spurious investments. Moreover, Doreen’s dead momma, Lillith, may have been murdered, and there’s some question about whether her son Adam actually wound up dead in the river. With very little help from Jitty, an irrepressible family ghost in a cloche, Sarah Booth manages to absolve Doreen and seriously mangle her own love life.
Lacks the charm and joie de bayou one expects from tales of the Big Easy. And where’s the fun in a ghost who nags?
