DUSTED TO DEATH
by Barbara Colley
Housekeeper almost gets her clock cleaned when a movie company shoots in her client’s Greek Revival home.
As owner of Maid-for-a-Day, Charlotte LaRue (Wash and Die, 2008, etc.) normally has her pick of which jobs to take herself and which to hand over to her employees. But it’s hard to say no to Bitsy Duhè, widow of New Orleans’ former mayor and one of Charlotte’s oldest customers. Besides, watching over a movie shoot in Bitsy’s mansion sounds like a piece of cake—and with her handsome neighbor Louis Thibodeaux acting kind of weird, Charlotte won’t at all mind getting a peek at leading man Hunter Lansky. Leading lady Angel Martinique is another story—flighty, fussy and peremptory. Her tantrums mess up the shooting schedule, her long list of dos and don’ts drive makeup artist Heather Cortez crazy, and her fights with boyfriend Nick Franklin keep bodyguard Toby Russell busy full time. So soon after Nick is stabbed to death, the NOPD’s Gavin Brown has Angel in cuffs. But her driver Benny Jackson, a childhood friend of Charlotte’s son Hank, thinks she’s been set up and begs the cleaner to investigate. Together they drive down to Angel’s hometown, Oakdale, Miss., where they learn enough to cast serious doubt on the star’s guilt and to put Charlotte in serious danger.
An eighth straightforward puzzle in which likable amateur sleuth Charlotte does her level best to straighten up someone else’s mess.