Greedy Bones

April 27, 2009
In Haines's bone-rattling ninth puzzler (after 2008's Wishbones
), Sarah Booth Delaney returns to Zinnia, Miss., and her ancestral home, Dahlia House, after the eruption there of a mysterious illness so scary agents from Atlanta's Centers for Disease Control must be called in. Tinkie Richmond, Sarah's best friend and PI partner, fears her husband, Oscar, is dying after a visit to the nearby “cursed” Carlisle cotton plantation infected with mutant boll weevils and a strange mold. Sounds like a horror movie, but it's no laughing matter as Sarah Booth sets aside her Hollywood honey, Graf Milieu, to help her former love interest, Sheriff Coleman Peters, solve a perplexing case that will eventually claim victims by such causes as shooting and hanging. Lending spectral advice is Jitty, Dahlia House's wonderfully wise “haint,” one of the best features of this light paranormal mystery series infused with Southern charm.

May 15, 2009
Boll weevils and genetically altered cotton threaten a plantation in Zinnia, Miss.

Barely over their Costa Rican escapade (Wishbones, 2008), Sarah Booth Delaney and Tinkie Richmond, partners in Sunflower County's Delaney Detective Agency, are bedeviled by disastrous events at the derelict Carlisle plantation. The old place is a source of constant friction between its feuding heirs, brother and sister Luther and Erin, who can't agree whether to sell it off to developer Jimmy Janks. Four people who recently visited the property, including Tinkie's husband Oscar, now hover near death. The doctors are puzzled. So are two scientists from the CDC and a pair from the Mississippi Agri-team. While the sheriff falls for the CDC bombshell, Tinkie wills her husband to live; Sarah Booth converses with Jitty (the ghost only she hears) and fights nausea; and their best pal Cece, a transgendered reporter, goes investigating and gets her nose bashed. Has a plague overtaken the county? Is someone fiddling with nature for nefarious reasons? Before Zinnia sinks back into its usual good manners and genteel deportment, casualties will mount; a whole cotton crop will be devastated; and Sarah Booth will once again blithely saunter into danger any reader could have warned her about several chapters earlier.

Yes, the villains are fairly easy to spot and Sarah Booth's love life is a tad schmaltzy, but Haines has added a nice little bite to her conversational comebacks, and it's fun to watch Jitty's astral wardrobe changes.

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

June 1, 2009
Southern belle Sarah Booth Delaney, an aspiring Hollywood actress and PI, is back home in Mississippi in this ninth book in the series. Everything is going well with both her acting career and her romance with leading-man Graf Mileau, but duty calls on the home front when the husband of her friend Tinkie falls seriously ill. The vicious illness soon has other victims lapsing into comas. It is up to Sarah Booth to discover if the illness is tied into genetically altered boll weevils and cotton plants. Even the scientists from the Centers for Disease Control cant tell for sure if this is a natural plague or an act of terrorism. Although Sarahs pal Tinkie is unable to offer much assistance, because she refuses to leave the side of her comatose husband, her other buddies, Millie and Cece, lend a helping hand. The plot may be a bit far-fetched, but fans wont mind, as the cast isin fine form (including the helpful ghost, Jitty), and its good to be back in Mississippi. All in all, one of the more entertaining episodes in the series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)