Mama Detective Series

There’s not a killer in the world who can hide from Mama….

Dark encounters and deadly lessons

I was happy to volunteer a few days back home to help Mama distribute clothing to the needy. But I didn’t expect big-city dangers to follow me all the way to Otis, South Carolina.

Instead of doing good deeds and cooking up a storm, Mama was digging deep into shady secrets after young Brenda Long was discovered dead in a shallow grave. Someone wanted Brenda silenced bad enough to kill, and the list of suspects is long.

But is the killer the drug-dealing teacher that Brenda threatened to expose? Or can it have been the man who was sent to jail after Brenda caught him stealing — now paroled and bent on exacting his revenge?

Everyone knows that Mama has had good luck as the town’s unofficial sleuth. But as a maze of tangled relationships leads to dead ends and dead bodies, time is slipping away. For our worst enemies can masquerade as friends — and even Mama’s luck can run out….

With Mama on the case, murder meets its match….

A tryst with a deadly twist.

All I’d wanted to do back home in Otis, South Carolina, was whip up a wonderful thirty-fifth anniversary party for my parents. But we’d hardly picked the baker before Mama found herself volunteering her services for the one thing she did nearly as well as cook. And that is sleuthing.

You see, Ruby Spikes was found dead in a motor inn with a gun in her hand, a suicide note, and a certified check receipt to a man no one ever heard of–not even the trio of Otis gossips who are Mama’s rock-solid source of information.  Neither they nor Mama, despite Ruby’s tormented diary, were convinced she went to her reward willingly. But this was a young woman with an outsize bundle of secrets and enemies.  And when Mama starts sorting them out, and sudden death makes a return visit, it looks like she’ll uncover the truth only by making herself–and me–a killer’s next target….

Two things Mama knows: sweet-potato pie…and murder.

Old bones and buried secrets…

I would have thought a bunion operation might slow Mama down, but I should have known better. We found ourselves knee-deep in somebody else’s trouble even before the surgery, when we saw crazy old Miss Birdie at the grocery store with a baby that didn’t belong to her. It wasn’t twenty-four hours later that the baby’s mother, a young woman with a wild reputation, was murdered–and the baby had vanished.

And when my Daddy’s wandering dog began bringing home old bones of the most shocking kind, no way Mama wasn’t going to start snooping–with me doing her legwork. It’s a good thing I still had two good feet, because before long, I was running for my life…as babies’ cries and women’s tears mingled in a crime fueled by motives as ancient as human memory–greed, jealousy, and old-fashioned revenge.

When my mama receives an angry visit from Nat Mixon, she learns some startling news. Nat’s mother and Mama’s neighbor, spiteful recluse Hannah Mixon, has just died–and left a large parcel of land to Mama! Nat is convinced Mama stole his inheritance, and to save her reputation, Mama’s determined to find out why Hannah named her in her will. And when it turns out Hannah was murdered, Mama needs to find more answers. With the help of three notorious local gossips–and me–Mama uncovers a long, bloody history of greed and family betrayal connected to the land Mama’s inherited. And unless she discovers the truth about this plot of land, it may become her burial plot….