Splintered Bones (Sarah Booth Delaney Series #3) » (Reprint)

A native of Mississippi, Carolyn Haines lives in southern Alabama on a farm with her horses, dogs, and cats. She was recently honored with an Alabama State Council on the Arts literary fellowship for her writing. She is a former photojournalist.

She may be a Mississippi belle, but Sarah Booth Delaney is no pampered daddy’s girl. Unwed and over thirty, Sarah has her own set of problems—like coping with regular hauntings by her great-great-grandmother’s nanny, a busybody of a ghost who’s set on marrying her off to the first suitor who comes calling. But when an old friend is in trouble, Sarah Booth doesn’t hesitate to get involved.

Splintered Bones

Eulalee McBride has confessed to murdering her husband...and she wants Sarah to dig up the dirt on the violent scalawag to prove he got what he deserved. Sarah Booth suspects that her friend is lying through her pearly whites...but why? There’s certainly no lack of suspects in Zinnia, Mississippi, including Bud Lynch, a horse trainer who arouses killer lust in the town’s women. As Sarah Booth begins to put together the pieces of the case, a killer is preparing to strike again. And this time it could send one late-blooming southern sleuth into an early grave.

Publishers Weekly

Described on the somewhat staid cover as "a mystery from the Mississippi Delta," Haines's third Southern cozy (first in hardcover) is heavy on the cornpone, but is saved from the totally ridiculous by a hearty leavening of laughter. Sarah Booth Delaney and her cohorts, Tinkie Richmond and Cece Dee Falcon (formerly Cecil but that's for another story) band together to save friend and horse breeder Eulalee "Lee" McBride from a first-degree murder rap. Lee has confessed to the murder of her loutish husband, Kemper Fuquar, in order to save her mixed-up 14-year-old daughter, Kip Fuquar, from the charge. The sheriff is hard-put to find a woman any woman on the outlying magnolia-scented estates who didn't have a motive to crush Kemper's skull, then sic Avenger, a temperamental show horse, on the rotter. When she's not busy being a PI, Sarah Booth stays busy playing with her red tick hound, Sweetie Pie; talking to a resident ghost, Jitty, in her antebellum mansion; reluctantly scouring the area for a date to the hunt ball; baby-sitting for a willful Kip; and reading Kinky Friedman books. Sarah Booth keeps up with her friends' lipstick and nail polish colors, and even goes along with having Sweetie Pie's hair dyed brown from its graying shade. The author's long on accent, if short on clues that help elucidate the mystery. But Haines (Them Bones) keeps her sense of humor throughout, holding the reader's attention and internal laugh track right down to the last snicker. Agent, Marion Young. (Mar. 5) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.