Things that go bump in the Bayou...
For bookseller and amateur sleuth Claire Malloy getting a root canal beats going to a Malloy family reunion. But it is time her fifteen-year-old daughter Caron visits her deceased father's relatives. Now Claire and Caron have arrived at Malloy Manor, a run-down mansion in Louisiana's bayou country...where the mosquitoes are big enough to barbecue, the swamp is crawling with alligators, the butler looks like he stepped out of a teen slasher movie, and the wheelchair-bound matriarch, Miss Justicia, races around the grounds cackling like a loon.
It's the perfect setting-for a murder. Before a night has passed, Miss Justicia is sleeping with the fishes. The police call it a tragic accident. Caron is all for calling a cab. But Claire wants to have a closer look at her loving relatives since she has a hunch leaving Malloy Manor isn't going to be all that easy...and neither is staying alive.
Joan Hessis a winner of the American Mystery Award and the author of twelve previous Claire Malloy books, including
Roll Over and Play Dead,
A Diet to Die For,
A Conventional Corpse,
Dear Miss Demeanor, and
Strangled Prose, as well as the Maggody mystery series. A member of Sisters in Crime and a former president of the American Crime Writers League, she lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.