Splintered Bones

Zusatztext “Wickedly funny. DevIlishly clever. Scintillatingly Southern. Carolyn Haines is an author to die for.” --Carolyn Hart! author of April Fool Dead Informationen zum Autor Carolyn Haines Klappentext 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. Chapter 1 There is something about warm soil that connects the past and future into the present. The earth is female in the truest sense of the word. Life springs from it. It is the power of the feminine, the base of creation. For a Delaney, land is the source of family and heritage. For me, Sarah Booth Delaney, the last of this old Southern family, the rich soil of the Mississippi Delta holds the promise of seed and growth--the fecundity that my own womb has been denied. Or at least denied for the moment. The black soil was rich and damp beneath my fingers as I turned the earth with the trowel. Gardening isn't one of my passions. In fact, this was my first attempt. But I had been inspired by a master gardener's words, and the pull of a hot March sun on this Monday morning had been irresistible. Beneath my gentle hands, the ten containers of various herbs would sprout into lush health. I might not be Mother Nature, but I was apprenticing as one of her daughters. In this new venture, I was aided by my heritage. Dahlia House has some of the best topsoil in the world. Anything can grow here. And I had the books of the late Lawrence Ambrose to guide me. I picked up a plastic container, checking to see that it was lemon basil. I held it aloft, asking the sun to power it to a huge shrub, a Godzilla lemon basil! Holding the basil and my trowel aloft, I felt the power of a gardening goddess. I would yield a crop! And I would never go hungry again! "Girl, you holdin' that hand spade like Xena about to be struck by lightning. What's got you out here in the hot sun grubbin' around in the dirt like Mr. Green Jeans?" I lowered the sacred vessel of basil and my trowel and looked into the dark-chocolate eyes of my nemesis and companion, Jitty. Lucky for the rest of the world, Jitty afflicts only me. She's a ghost. An old ghost with a streak of bossiness a mile wide. "I'm planting an herb garden, if you must know." I knelt back in the earth, searching again for the sense of power and strength that had evaporated. "Get you a sun hat. You thirty-three. Almost thirty-four. If you let that sun beat down on you, your neck's gone go all crepey an' look just like puckered chicken skin. You ain't got but a few good years left. You better preserve what you can." Jitty took a seat on an overturned bucket. Rocking back on my heels I looked at her. Her skin was a smooth milk-chocolate, and it covered a body that curved and swelled in all the right places. Death might not be a pleasant experience, but ghosthood had some definite advantages. She would never age, while I would plump and wither, depending on which stage of decline I happened to be in....

Product details

• Authors: Carolyn Haines
• Publisher: Dell Publishing Inc.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 04.02.2003
• EAN: 9780440237211
• ISBN: 978-0-440-23721-1
• No. of pages: 384
• Dimensions: 107 mm x 173 mm x 25 mm
• Series: Sarah Booth Delaney; Sarah Booth Delaney
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature