Can't Never Tell

December 1, 2008
Summertime and the living is frightful for South Carolina lawyer Avery Andrews in Pickens's fifth Southern Fried mystery, a less successful entry than the previous one, Hush My Mouth
(2008). First, there's the chain-saw wielding mannequin her niece sees in a fair's chamber of horrors that turns out to be a mummified corpse. Next, a pre–Fourth of July picnic at Bow Falls turns deadly when Rinda Reimann, a professor's wife, falls into the falls. When Rinda's husband is too distraught to cope, an overprotective friend asks Avery to file an insurance claim on the professor's behalf. Avery's suspicions about Rinda's “accident” deepen after the postmortem raises some serious questions. While Avery's sassy assistant, Shamanique, easily tracks down the carny corpse's identity, the effort to discover who pushed Rinda to a watery grave gets bogged down in too much financial detail. Cozy readers looking for escape from reality may want to skip the concluding tips on how to avoid consumer fraud.

February 1, 2009
A small-town lawyer follows the money and finds a murderer.

Returning to her roots in Dacus, S.C., lawyer Avery Andrews never imagines it will become a hotbed of murder. When she takes her niece Emma to a local carnival, they discover a mummified corpse in the fright house. Next day they join a family picnic, where Rinda Reimann, a newly returned Dacus native, takes a fatal plunge from Bow Falls. Aside from Avery's relatives, the picnickers are mostly colleagues of her brother-in-law, a college professor. It turns out Rinda was having an affair with her former high-school squeeze. Her husband Rog, the proverbial absent-minded professor, immediately falls prey to a pushy female colleague who seems indecently eager for him to get his hands on Rinda's insurance money. Avery's only pleasant experience is her meeting and date with charming Professor Spencer Munn, who has a lucrative sideline in money management. The carnies hire Avery to discover the identity of their mummy, and Rog, seemingly unaware that he's suspect No. 1, asks for help getting his affairs in order. After endless complications and conversations, a blackberry bramble provides a clue that closes the case.

Enough Southern eccentrics to satisfy the most devoted fans of Avery (Hush My Mouth, 2008, etc.), but this time the plot is straightforward and not obscured by too much kitsch.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

January 1, 2009
Feisty attorney Avery Andrews seems to be settling back into Dacus, her South Carolina hometown. About a year ago she was a high-powered malpractice attorney in Columbia, South Carolina. Now, at the beginning of July, she is still learning how to be a small-town general-practice lawyer. Fortunately, there are a couple of puzzles at hand to which she can apply her lawyerly mind. First, her precocious seven-year-old niece discovers that a mannequin in a carnival fright house is a real skeleton. Who was it, how old is it, and where didit come from? The next day Avery attends a picnic with her sisters family and other college faculty members. A faculty wife falls off a waterfall. Was she pushed, and if so, who was responsible? Pickens won the Malice Domestic Contest for Best Traditional Mystery (for Southern Fried, 2004), and this fifth in the series solidifies her as an assured voice in the cozy subgenre. Unlike other cozy authors, Pickens never resorts to caricatures of either southerners or lawyers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)