Smarty Bones

March 18, 2013
At the start of Haines’s hokey 13th Sarah Booth Delaney mystery (after 2012’s Bonefire of the Vanities), Dr. Olive Twist, a professor at a prestigious New England college, arrives in Zinnia, Miss., to investigate the 150-year-old exhumed corpse of the Lady in Red—a mysterious beauty whose enigmatic past may connect prominent local families to a Lincoln assassination attempt. Eager to share this theory with anyone within earshot, Olive ruffles local feathers. Scandal and PI Sarah Booth arrive on the scene when the body of Olive’s assistant is discovered poisoned in Olive’s hotel room. Jitty, Sarah Booth’s whimsical ghost confidante, serves up some comic relief. While Olive offers predictable stereotypes of Southern culture, the natives react in such hackneyed and simplistic ways that some readers may feel Olive’s complaints are justified. Cheery prose is a plus, but an improbable antebellum twist will dismay some historians. Agent: Marian Young, the Young Agency.

May 1, 2013
The best families of Zinnia, Miss., fear that a beautiful corpse will tie them to the Lincoln assassination. No sooner has the puckishly named Olive Twist arrived at The Gardens B&B than she claims that her research will implicate the Lady in Red, a woman dead since the Civil War era, in President Abraham Lincoln's shooting and demonstrate that she shares the same gene pool as either transgender society reporter Cece Falcon or wealthy Oscar Richmond, husband of Tinkie, Sarah Booth Delaney's partner in her detective agency. The town's old guard is so dismayed they ask the private eyes (Bonefire of the Vanities, 2012, etc.) to shush the historian. Sarah Booth and Tinkie have hardly gotten a word in when Olive's room is firebombed; her overworked assistant, Jimmy Boswell, is poisoned; and Cece's brother Jeremiah and Oscar's cousin Buford begin urging the Heritage Pride Heroes, a bunch of redneck survivalists, to take up arms. Sarah Booth and her fiance, Graf, her dog Sweetie Pie and cat Pluto enter full detective mode, much to the chagrin of Sheriff Coleman, Sarah Booth's first love, who now seems so smitten with Olive that he never leaves her side. A rival historian staying at the B&B is thrilled with Olive's woes. Graf goes missing. He is found. The Lady in Red's corpse is abducted. Graf goes missing again. Jeremiah and Buford claim they have nothing to do with his disappearance. They don't, but the B&B owner falls under suspicion. To find Graf and unravel the Lady in Red's history, Sarah Booth must survive a car crash, get rescued by Pluto's claws, trudge up to the Dahlia House attic to read old letters secreted in a trunk and accost a demented perp who's loathed her for years. Less chipper than most of Sarah Booth's excursions--and it's time to lay that silly ghost Jitty to rest.

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May 1, 2013
Sarah Booth Delaney and her partner, Tinkie, are asked to stop abrasive historian Olive Twist from trying to prove that the Lady in Red, a perfectly preserved body dating from Civil War times, is an ancestor of two powerful families in Zinnia, Mississippi. Olive is also bent on proving the Lady in Red was involved in Abraham Lincoln's assassination. When her assistant, Jimmy Boswell, is killed, Olive asks Sarah Booth and Tinkie to investigate. Assisted by Tinkie's husband, Sarah Booth's fianc', and Dahlia House's haint (ghost) Jitty, they follow a trail that leads to the survivalist relatives of the Falcons and the Richmonds. A satisfying mystery framed by a well-drawn small-town southern setting.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)