Looks like open season on cheating husbands in Danville, Virginia. Brightly remorseless Eleanor Royden has just emptied a revolver into the man who ditched her for a bimbo named Staci-- don't worry, she saved a bullet for Staci, too--and Donna Jean Morgan's husband, the Rev. Chevry Morgan, has died of arsenic poisoning shortly after announcing his polygamous marriage to his own bimbo. When Donna Jean tells her lawyer, Bill MacPherson, that she's a descendant of Lethal Lucy Todhunter--the local celebrity whose husband also died of arsenic poisoning soon after returning from the Civil War--Bill wants his sister Elizabeth (MacPherson's Lament, 1992, etc.) to reopen the Todhunter case and figure out just how Lucy did it. But can Elizabeth rouse herself from her concerns with her divorced mother's current lesbian fling and her own cheerful denial of marital loss--she's still writing letters to the husband who'll never return--and can Bill get justice for Miri Malone, the animal-rights activist who wants to marry a dolphin? Elizabeth's eighth outing has it all--a gaggle of tidy mysteries, nonstop laughs, bumper-sticker wisdom about the male animal, and some other, sadder kinds of wisdom, too. Quite a banquet--if you don't mind all that arsenic. (Literary Guild, Doubleday & Mystery Guild selections)
