Huckleberry Finished (Deliah Dickenson Mystery Series #2) »

Delilah Dickinson's literary travel agency is a hit! And now, after an alarmingly lively tour through the Old South of Gone with the Wind, she's ready to embark on a leisurely steamboat trip down the Mississippi, a la Huckleberry Finn. But when one of her passengers winds up dead, Delilah reckons she'll have to get to the bottom of this downright ornery mystery. . ..

Ain't no doubt about it: Ben Webster was murdered, broken neck and all. And, as it turns out, he caused quite a ruckus and made a few enemies before he expired by trying to slug a roulette dealer. Delilah knows the steamship's no-nonsense head of security definitely is dirty and low-down and just plain old mean. . .but could he be a murderer? It's all enough to make her wish she was floating lazily down the Mississippi with Huck and Jim, mainly.

But when someone breaks into and searches her cabin, Delilah is fixin' to do some seriously sly sleuthing into all of this foolishness. Pretty soon her list of suspects is longer than the Mississippi is wide. . .not to mention she's taken quite a shine to Mark Twain himself--or rather Mark Lansing, the handsome actor playing Huck Finn's scribe for the tour.

But of course things just ain't never what they seem when Delilah's at the helm, and one tricky murder turns into two and things start to get pretty dicey on yonder steamboat. Thankfully Delilah's sassy daughter Melissa is only a phone call away because she'll need all the help she can get to keep the boat and it's passengers from an ending that could only be described as. . .explosive!

Livia J. Washburn has been a professional writer for more than twenty years. She received the Private Eye of America Award and the American Mystery Award for her first mystery, Wild Night. She is also the author of Frankly My Dear, I'm Dead, the first book in her Literary Tour mystery series. She lives in Azle, Texas.

Publishers Weekly

Set aboard a Mark Twain–themed cruise on the not-so-peaceful Mississippi, Washburn's snappy second mystery to feature literary travel agent Delilah Dickinson (after 2008's Frankly My Dear, I'm Dead) shows how much mischief a tour group can get into while confined to a moving paddle wheeler. When one of Delilah's charges, Ben Webster, causes a scene in the casino, the captain calls Delilah on the carpet. Ben later vanishes only to reappear as a corpse. Meanwhile, a charming onboard Mark Twain impersonator, Mark Lansing, takes a shine to Delilah, but turns out to have more than one identity to hide. And Mark isn't alone in harboring secrets, as one teary-eyed tour group member confides that a riverboat employee was murdered precisely one year earlier on the same tract of waterway. Delilah saves more than the day as Washburn smoothly infuses this cozy with hints of romance and humor as well as glimpses of Twain sights in today's Hannibal, Mo. (Nov.)