Guest Sleuth Spotlight: Bessie Barr
Series: An OWL Ladies Cozy Mystery
The Book:
Minnie Mae Harper has been through this once already, and the lesson stuck: don't move until you've got something to move with. So when McKinney turns up another body, she doesn't rush it. She waits, and she watches, and she lets the town tell on itself.
It's February 1900, and the square is strung with paper hearts and fiddle music for the Ladies Aid Society's Valentine's Day Square-Dance-a-thon — three nights, the whole county, everybody's best boots. Before sunrise on the second day, Amos Pruitt is found dead behind the Magnolia House. Pruitt called the dances and collected other people's secrets, and he was the sort of man nobody much liked and everybody tolerated, which in a town this size is its own kind of arrangement. Now it's over, and half the county has a reason to be glad.
That's the trouble. Everybody on that dance floor had cause, and everyone who didn't is busy pointing at somebody who did. Worse, the person the evidence keeps circling back to is someone Minnie Mae trusts — and trust, she is finding out, is a terrible thing to be carrying when you're trying to see a thing clearly. Six church ladies with quilting needles and strong opinions take the case between them. The answer isn't hiding in the dark. It's out on a crowded floor in full view, wearing something that looks like it has nothing to do with murder at all.
Rating: 4.9 out of 5 stars (37 ratings)
“Six church ladies with quilting needles and strong opinions does most of the work by itself. What makes this one worth your evening is the shape of the problem — the answer is out on a crowded dance floor the whole time, in plain sight, disguised as something with nothing to do with a murder. If you want turn-of-the-century Texas with six women in it who have no intention of being managed, Bessie Barr has built you exactly that.”
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