Killer on a Hot Tin Roof (Deliah Dickenson Mystery Series #3) »

Delilah Dickinson is finally looking forward to a nice, relaxing time leading her literary travel agency's latest tour at the annual Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans. After all, a group of intelligent, low-key English professors can't be too much trouble, right?

Wrong, as it turns out. These academics don't waste any time showing their claws, especially when one of the professors claims he can prove Williams didn't even write Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But when the supposed real author—Howard Burleson, apparently once a very close friend of Tennessee's—turns up dead, Delilah knows she's got to get to the bottom of things...even if the truth is as dirty as all them lies!

But, Lord—the cast of suspects! Tamara Paige's entire academic career will be ruined if it turns out that Williams wasn't the actual playwright, and Delilah knows people have killed for much less. And it appears that someone else in the tour group is related to Burleson—someone who surely wouldn't want the world to know that the supposed "author" based the scathing play on his own proud Southern family.

So between finding a murderer and all the steamy affairs, squabbling, and shouts of "Shut up! / No, you shut up!" Delilah is beginning to feel like a certain cat stuck on a certain roof. Plus there's still a killer on the loose, and if she doesn't act quickly she just may find herself starring...in her very own death scene!

Publishers Weekly

Washburn's breezy, briskly paced third Literary Tour cozy (after 2009's Huckleberry Finished) takes Atlanta tour organizer Delilah Dickinson to New Orleans' French Quarter. Delilah's hopes for an uneventful trip, one spent shepherding college professors to the annual Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, are soon frustrated by the careerist infighting and emotional tensions among her charges. The group is particularly incensed to discover that one of its members, the ambitious Dr. Michael Frasier, plans to question the authorship of the novel's namesake play. When Frasier's surprise guest, his candidate for the real author and a onetime lover of Williams, turns up murdered, Delilah once again puts on her sleuthing cap. Washburn's literary in-jokes and lightly satirical jabs at academe entertain, but the book's main attraction is its likably down-to-earth protagonist, though many readers will probably figure out whodunit before she does. (Dec.)