Mysterious Writing





Skeleton Letters [by] Laura Childs

New York; Berkley Prime Crime [2011]

978-0-425-24389-3; $25.95

Skeleton Letters refers to a kind of basic lettering that Carmela Bertrand teaches to her customers and friends in her New Orleans Scrapbooking Store, Memory Mine.  It is this store that a group of the Crescent City’s women go to for community.  In the first scene, several of these friends are at nearby St. Tristan’s Church when a cloaked figure rushes in, knocking over one of the ladies with a statue of St. Sebastian, which kills her, and makes off with the displayed crucifix, which may have belonged to the church’s founder, Père Etienne, and which was found during an archaeological dig under the church.

Carmela’s main squeeze, Detective Edgar Babcock catches the case, and warns Carmela not to get involved – he knows that she has snooped in the past, and does not want her to continue to do so.  Bu then, she caves in to the pleas of the dead woman’s dear friend Baby, who is also one of her regulars, and the die is cast.

You’d think Carmela wouldn’t have time, what with running her shop and all of the other things she has to do.  The dead woman was going to have her house decorated for the annual Holiday Tour of homes, but that can’t happen now, and Baby asks Carmela to spiffy up the home she used to have with her ex-husband in the Garden District, and which she won in the settlement, for the Tour.  She has also been working on a wine-tasting for a friend, which goes off without a hitch, except that the nemesis of her friend Ava, a haughty socialite named Rain Monroe, keeps turning up to drip venom – she’d already blackballed Ava at church, where she volunteers, because Ava runs a Voodoo-based gift shop. Carmela also starts advising a friend of one of the scrapbookers, who trying to erite a mystery novel based on the death of their friend.

Ava and Carmela visit a new restaurant, and Ava suddenly becomes the owner’s “muse” for the Voodoo Couture line of clothing he has a stake in.  And Carmela ends up offering to redo his menu design.  They also volunteer at a soup kitchen they’ve gone to to gather clues – they met the man who runs it when exploring the church after the murder.  He sends them to a cult that meets outside of town, where they are summarily booted out.  When they return to the soup kitchen, they find out that the man has also been murdered. And Carmela is listed by a nosy reporter as having been an eyewitness at both of the murders.  Soon Carmela and Ava are running from a car driven by a maniac who seems out to kill them.

It seems wise to get out of town, so Carmela borrows her ex-husband’s keys to his hunting cabin on one of the bayous.  There, during a horrible lightening storm, they are stalked by the killer.  The cavalry comes over the hill to save the day, but not until after their lives are put at risk and exciting feats of derring-do are performed.

This is a fun cozy with an intrepid heroine and fun sidekicks.  Also some tips on scrapbooking and delicious-sounding recipes. Recommended. ~ lss-r

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This is a library book.