Independent Bones

December 1, 2020

Haines's Independent Bones features PI Sarah Booth Delaney, caught up with protecting a visiting professor of Greek literature at Ole Miss whose radical feminism may have sparked murder (40,000-copy first printing). In Jonasson's latest, Una is teaching in a remote Icelandic village when she discovers dark secrets the polite if distant villages have kept hidden for generations--perhaps involving The Girl Who Died (50,000-copy first printing). A peasant girl is murdered in a northern Chinese village, and exiled inspector Lu Fei takes the case in Klingborg's Thief of Souls (75,000-copy first printing). Brought back by Lupica in 2018, PI Sunny Randall investigates the suicide of best friend Spike's 20-year old niece in Robert B. Parker's Payback. In 1910, a senior barrister is found dead in a notorious London slum, and junior barrister Daniel Pitt endangers his family by investigating in Perry's Death with a Double Edge. In Walker's The Coldest Case, applying the facial reconstruction tools used on ancient skulls to the skull of a long-dead murder victim leads Bruno, chief of police in fictional town in the Dordogne, to the activities of a Cold War-era Communist organization. With A Peculiar Combination, Louisiana librarian Weaver detours from her beloved Amory Ames books to launch a new series starring Electra "Ellie" McDonnell, who cracks safes with locksmith uncle Mick to make ends meet in World War II England and agrees to help the government when she's caught (40,000-copy first printing).

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February 15, 2021
It might be a #MeToo backlash when a fearless feminist's rhetoric is used to frame her for the murders of several misogynists. Though she's always seen herself as a feminist firebrand, particularly compared to her neighbors in Zinnia, Mississippi, Sarah Booth Delaney has nothing on her newest client, Alala Diakos. Dr. Diakos is a Greek professor who's come to town to work on her latest, a nonfiction book on women's struggle for equality, and she's been practicing what she preaches all over Zinnia. Her thoughts on the patriarchy, particularly on what should happen to male abusers, seem uncomfortably linked to a series of mysterious deaths of men from Alala's academic circles, though she swears she's being framed. Alala hires the Delaney Detective Agency after the latest fatality, well-known local wife beater Curtis Miller, who Alala insists wasn't the victim of her extermination-focused justice. Another obvious suspect in Curtis' death, his beleaguered wife, Tansy, seems easy to rule out because of the many times she let Curtis drive her home from the emergency room after he put her there; in fact, she was in the ER for a sprained wrist when Curtis was shot. But if Alala isn't behind Curtis' death, who is? Sarah Booth and her partner, Tinkie Richmond, dig in, though their usual meddling is hampered as Tinkie approaches what feels like her one-millionth trimester. Sarah Booth's boyfriend, Sheriff Coleman Peters, provides some assistance, though there's no time for much romance between the two. As for Jitty, the resident haint of Sarah Booth's ancestral home, her cryptic "help" is only a sign that Jitty wants to steal the spotlight. Tackling timely matters puts a serious spin on a usually lighter series.

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April 26, 2021
The shooting murder of Curtis Miller, “a well-known domestic abuser,” kick-starts Haines’s middling 23rd Sarah Booth Delaney mystery (2020’s A Garland of Bones). The prime suspect, Greek literature professor Alala Diakos, who has come to Zinnia, Miss., to write a book on the battle for women’s rights in America, hires Sarah Booth to prove her innocence. When Sarah Booth asks her PI partner, Tinkie Richmond, about Dr. Diakos’s philosophy, Tinkie answers: “Men who abuse women should be exterminated with the utmost efficiency. Hopefully, by a mob of angry women.” That the professor was on the suspect list for two similar murders doesn’t discourage Sarah Booth, and she and Tinkie set out to discover who else might have wanted Miller dead. Sarah Booth’s intuition tells her that the three murders are connected, but what could Miller, a nonacademic, have in common with the other victims, an English professor at Ole Miss and a sociologist at Vanderbilt? The unfocused, digressive plot builds to a hurried resolution that leaves readers with unanswered questions. Cozy fans attuned to the #MeToo movement may want to check this one out. Agent: Marian Young, Young Agency.

May 1, 2021
During the dedication of a new park in the Mississippi Delta town of Zinnia, Dr. Alala Diakos, visiting professor of Greek literature at Ole Miss, begins an impromptu lecture on feminism. She is heckled by a local man, a known wife abuser, and they come to blows. Hours later he is found dead, shot in the same way as two other professors accused of abuse. With all evidence pointing to her, Diakos hires Sarah Booth Delaney and Tinkie Bellcase Richmond, co-owners of a PI firm, to prove that she's being framed. As they investigate, Sarah Booth and Tinkie learn that the victim was a member of a secret misogynist organization committed to limiting women's rights. Further investigations lead to the Ole Miss campus and a local women's shelter. (The theme of women's rights through history is highlighted by Jitty, the Delaney family haint, a southern variety of ghost, who appears disguised as a succession of independent female outlaws. Despite the serious underpinnings of the investigation, the PI duo bring levity through Tinkie's concerns with her late-stage pregnancy and their dogs' antics while riding along from place to place.

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