The Nature of Things

Needing some light reading as a palate cleanser, I turned to Carolyn Haines. It doesn't come any lighter and fluffier than her Southern belle private eye series featuring Sarah Booth Delaney (hereafter referred to as SB). It turned out this one didn't so much cleanse my reading palate as poison it, or at least curdle it. Let me not mince words: This is not a good book. In this entry, we have SB heading to Hollywood, on the basis of one turn as a star in a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in Zinnia, Mississippi, to star in a remake of Body Heat, with her in the Kathleen Turner role and her lover, Graf Milieu (that name - really???), in the William Hurt role. So, we have two complete unknowns starring in the millions of dollars remake of this major motion picture. Oh, yes, and Ashton Kutcher is in a supporting role. In Hollywood, SB and Graf seem to spend most of their time making sweet, sweet love and very little time working. They roll onto the movie set around midday, afte...

Ham Bones by Carolyn Haines My rating: 1 of 5 stars Feeling the urge for some popcorn for the brain - or, since it is summer, perhaps a shaved ice for the brain - I turned to one of Carolyn Haines' Southern Belle Mysteries. This is the seventh one in the series. I had read the other six and found some of them diverting and others less so. There was at least a fifty percent chance that this one would entertain me. I don't give up on books. If I choose to start reading one, I'm going to finish it, even if I don't like it. Many, maybe most, readers can't really understand this, feeling that life is too short to waste any of it on a bad book, and they have no hesitation in tossing one aside if it doesn't appeal to them. But I have this sense that I've made a contract with the writer by picking up his/her book and I need to fulfill my contract. All that being said, I came about as close as I have in recent memory to giving up on a book after about fifty pages of...

Bones To Pick by Carolyn Haines My rating: 3 of 5 stars I felt the need of something light and fluffy to read as an antidote to the winter doldrums. There's not much that is lighter or fluffier than Carolyn Haines' Southern Belle mystery series. I have been occasionally reading the entries in this series for a while, maybe one or two a year, and so I decided to grab the next one, Bones To Pick , and settle down for a cozy reading experience. Sarah Booth Delaney had failed in her attempts to break into the acting profession in New York and had returned home to the Mississippi Delta town of Zinnia about a year ago. Since then, she has stolen her best friend's dog, decided to become a private investigator, set up a PI business with her best friend as partner, engaged in a series of hot and heavy short-term romances, fallen in love with the (married) county sheriff, solved several murders, saved the family home from bank foreclosure, and acquired a horse and a hound. Yes, it h...

Hallowed Bones by Carolyn Haines My rating: 4 of 5 stars And here's another of my guilty pleasure reads for the summer - the fifth entry in Carolyn Haines' Sarah Booth Delaney series. It was great fun to read and, indeed, may be my favorite in the series so far. Sarah Booth Delaney's private investigation business in the little delta town of Zinnia, Mississippi, now has an actual business office. She has set up a couple of rooms of her family's plantation home, Dahlia House, as offices for herself and her partner, Tinkie. There's even a place for a receptionist's desk, just in case the business ever grows to the point that it needs one. Sarah Booth's latest case begins when she is contacted by a nun from New Orleans. The nun is a friend of a woman who is now being held on a warrant from New Orleans in the local Zinnia jail. The woman, Doreen, is a spiritualist and alleged faith healer with a large following in New Orleans. She had a baby who had severe birt...

Crossed Bones by Carolyn Haines My rating: 3 of 5 stars Sarah Booth Delaney lays claim to being a non-traditional Southern woman. She is in her thirties, a time by which any self-respecting Southern Belle would be long married and raising a family. This is certainly the path that would have been chosen for her by Jitty, the ghost of her great-great-grandmother's nanny with whom she shares her home, Dahlia House, in Zinnia, Mississippi. Jitty watches over her and bosses and nags her, but Sarah Booth continues to go her own way. She has eschewed marriage and is trying to establish a private investigation business with her best friend, Tinkie. The aim of the business is to provide enough money to save the family plantation home and support Sarah Booth in the style to which she is accustomed. So, yes, she is a bit non-traditional perhaps, but in one respect she is VERY traditional: She is always called by her double name Sarah Booth, never just Sarah. It's a Southern thang, dontch...

Splintered Bones by Carolyn Haines My rating: 3 of 5 stars I think I might have to categorize this book as one of my guilty reading pleasures. It's a bit of fluff - lighter than air really - but I found it highly entertaining. It's a book that fits well with the hot, sultry summer weather when you don't want to tax your brain too severely. Sarah Booth Delaney is a spinster of 33 years with no prospect of a marriage anytime soon. Or ever. This is not a big point of concern to Sarah Booth Delaney, but in the Delta town of Zinnia, Mississippi, where she lives, it is the kiss of social death. Sarah Booth (She's always called by both names - it's a Mississippi tradition.) has lived an unconventional life. After college, she went off to New York to try to make it as an actress. When that didn't work out, she returned to her family's ancestral home in Zinnia and started trying to figure out a way to save the farm and herself. The answer she came up with was to bec...

Seventy-six-year-old Lawrence Ambrose, a chip off the Truman Capote block, was once a celebrated name in the Southern literary world, but his heyday is long gone and he is mostly forgotten and ignored. All that may change though when his "biography" - actually an autobiography - comes out. He is writing the book but an ex super-star model's name will appear as the author and the word is out that the book will blow the lid off of several well-kept secrets of Ambrose's friends and running mates. As the year draws to a close, Ambrose invites all his friends and acquaintances, including one Sarah Booth Delaney, to a holiday dinner party where the tension among the guests is thick enough to be sliced by a knife. As it turns out though, it is the host who gets sliced. Sarah Booth finds him stone cold dead in a pool of blood the morning after the party. Moreover, it seems that the much-dreaded manuscript for Ambrose's tell-all book is missing. Soon, the woman who had lov...

I feel that I should put this book in the category of guilty pleasures. I know in my heart that it is not the kind of book that a woman about to celebrate her  mumble-mumble  birthday should be spending her time reading, and, yet, frankly, it was a joy to read! Sort of a  Fifty Shades of Grey  without all that nasty BDSM. There was a bit of hot and heavy sex but it was more alluded to than explicit, which is only proper in a story about a genteelly-bred Southern woman. Sarah Booth Delaney of Zinnia, Mississippi is not your stereotypical Southern belle though. She is over thirty, unemployed, and - horror of horrors! - unwed. She lives in her ancestral home, Dahlia House, in the Mississippi Delta. It is an ante bellum structure that has sheltered many generations of Delaneys, but now Sarah Booth is flat broke with no prospects of getting any money and she's about to lose her home, just when she's begun to understand how much she loves it. But Sarah Booth isn't alone in...