A GARLAND OF BONES

A road trip for informal but professional detective friends mixes business with pleasure when some dangerous pranks require investigation into the local spurned-woman scene.

Sarah Booth Delaney is taking a pre-Christmas break from her beloved ancestral home, Dahlia House, to travel from Zinnia, Mississippi, to the river town of Columbus, Mississippi. Tinkie Richmond, her friend and partner in the Delaney Detective Agency, and her husband, Oscar, have organized a trip to the town’s boutique B&B for their whole gang, including Sarah Booth and her boyfriend, Sheriff Coleman Peters, and their friends Cece, Jaytee, Harold, and Millie. Though Sarah Booth means the trip to be a break from her detective work, especially because Tinkie’s too pregnant to be very active, the women soon find themselves embroiled in a new case. Local femme fatale Clarissa Olson has been implicated in some not-so-harmless pranks, like filling her friend Bricey Presley's new Cadillac to the brim with cement. Clarissa’s a real piece of work, but Sarah Booth and Tinkie are used to handling even the most high-maintenance cases with their signature Southern charm and sass. The trouble in Clarissa’s crew apparently stems from the womanizing ways of Bart Crenshaw, who gave Bricey the Caddie, and Sarah Booth confirms that the case has something to do cheating men when her resident haint, Jitty, follows her to Columbus to reenact all the best love-’em-and-leave-’em film lines. Although it’s unclear whether Coleman’s Columbus law enforcement counterpart, Jerry Goode, is on the up and up, Coleman himself is on call to rescue Sarah Booth and Tinkie from trouble, unless they rescue themselves first.

A Southern charmer who’s not quite as clever as she and her author assume.