Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0385335903, Hardcover)
Carolyn Haines has delighted readers with her acclaimed Mississippi Delta mysteries, which introduced a truly unique heroine: Sarah Booth Delaney, an unconventional southern belle who solves uncommon murders. Now the author of Them Bones and Buried Bones makes her exciting hardcover debut with Splintered Bones, a novel that plunges her feisty Delta detective into a world of old money, new secrets, cheating hearts, and cold-blooded murder....
Splintered Bones
She may be a born-and-bred Mississippi belle, but it’s been a long time since Sarah Booth Delaney was a pampered daddy’s girl. Unwed and over thirty, Sarah has more important things on her mind–like trying to hang on to her family’s plantation...and coping with regular hauntings by her great-great-grandmother’s nanny, a bossy busybody of a ghost who is set on marrying her off to the first eligible suitor who comes calling.
But when a friend is in trouble, Sarah doesn’t hesitate to get involved. Eulalee McBride has confessed to killing her husband, Kemper, a gambling scalawag with a violent streak a mile wide. She wants Sarah to dig up the dirt on her dead spouse to prove he was a mean old bastard...and that’s why she bludgeoned him to death right before he was trampled by a 1,400-pound horse. But Sarah Booth knows her old friend is lying through her pearly whites–probably to protect her teenage daughter Kip, an angry kid who may have had her own reasons for wanting Kemper dead.
There’s certainly no lack of suspects–or studs–in Zinnia, Mississippi, including Bud Lynch, a trainer with a nasty secret, who arouses killer lust in the town’s women–all married and all ready to scratch each other’s eyes out for a roll in the hay with the Texas cowboy. Now, with the help of handsome Sheriff Coleman Peters, Sarah begins to put together the splintered pieces of the case. But as the season’s hunt ball draws near, she catches the unmistakable scent of blood...as a cunning killer gets ready to strike again. And this time it could send one late-blooming southern sleuth into an early grave.
In Sarah Booth Delaney, CAROLYN HAINES gives us an emancipated daughter of the New South: a steel magnolia with brains, grit, and heart who gives as good as she gets. And in
Splintered Bones, she offers plenty of wickedly brilliant humor and good old-fashioned suspense.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:13 -0400)
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Wikipedia in English
alone would be enough to set her apart from all the other "belles" in
Sunflower County, Mississippi, but she's also struggling and determined to
keep the home and land that has been in the Delaney family for generations.
She lives there with a red tick hound named Sweetie Pie and the opinionated
ghost of her great-great-grandmother's nanny, who is determined that Sarah
should be wed and bred (or at least bred) to produce an heir for Dahlia
House. Sarah has a flair for nosiness and knows how to ask the right
questions, so she runs a private investigating business to bring in money,
and when an old friend is in trouble, Sarah Booth doesn't hesitate to get
involved. Eulalee McBride is one of the "Daddy's Girls." who was raised to
be more decorative and manipulative than business-like, but she broke out of
that pack and became a very savvy horse breeder. Now, Lee has confessed to
murdering her husband, the truly despicable Kemper McBride, and hires Sarah
to dig up enough dirt on him to prove that he got what he deserved. Sarah
knows how dangerous the "he needed killing" defense was, and also suspects
that Lee is lying through her teeth to protect someone. As Sarah digs into
Kemper's dirty dealings, she find no shortage of suspects, and as she puts
the pieces together, a killer prepares to strike again.
I thought the plot was well thought out, though I figured out who the murderer really
was about 2/3 of the way through the book. But there were a couple of plot
contrivances (including a special "appearance" by Kinky Friedman) and the
way Jitty (the ghost) kept changing clothes tended to get on my nerves a
bit. Still, there was enough there to make me read more in this series.
I'll give it a 3.5.