Rock-a-Bye Bones: A Sarah Booth Delaney Mystery”
Author: Caroline Haines
Publisher: Minotaur Books ( St. Martin’s Publishing Group )
Pages: 344
Price: $25.99 (Hardcover)
“Rock-a-Bye Bones” is the 16th in the series, and I think I have read and reviewed them all.
Haines’s first was “Them Bones” (1999), in which she had Sarah Booth Delaney, failed New York actress, move back to Dahlia House in Sunflower County, near Zinnia, Mississippi. Delaney, inadvertently one might say, became a Private Investigator, developing a posse of helpers. She took as partner in the Delaney Agency her spunky socialite friend Tinkie. Millie at the café, Tameeka the mystic, and Cece the transsexual journalist all help out. Coleman Peters, the handsome local sheriff, serves double duty as love interest. Serving as a kind of conscience or alter ego is Jitty, the live-in ghost who had been an ante-bellum slave of Sarah Booth’s forbears.
Jitty is a thematic shape shifter. She takes the guise of some female, usually deceased or fictional, and gets Sarah Booth thinking along new lines. In “Rock-a-Bye Bones” Jitty appears as a Mother Superior, Ma Barker, Princess Diana and Marge Simpson, complete with blue hair.
Of course Sarah Booth has a faithful hound dog, an aloof cat and a herd of horses.
Series thrillers pose challenges. In novel time, so to speak, only two years have passed since the series started. Little Zinnia, like Cabot Cove, Maine, can’t have a murder every few days and still maintain its modest population, so Haines has moved the action around, to Dauphin Island and even to Costa Rica.
I confess, I was going to pass over “Rock-a-Bye Bones,” not review it. There was fatigue; air time is limited, and the series has established such a big readership it needed no publicity from me. But I started the book and it hooked me.
As Jitty and others relentlessly remind her, Sarah Booth needs a mate. She’s not getting any younger. This has resulted in some gooey, romantic, even melodramatic pillow talk I think most male readers, and some females, would find cloying.
Marriage, however, is usually anathema to thrillers, even cozies—Hammett’s “Thin Man” series being the best exception—so Delaney’s lovers have come and gone. For several episodes, Sarah Booth was engaged to movie star Graf Milieu, but that’s over.
As “Rock-a-Bye Bones” opens, Sarah Booth is mildly heartbroken, but three eligible men are after her and I think she enjoys the attention/confusion.
And in Chapter One, just before Thanksgiving, with Sarah Booth ineptly trying to prepare the group’s holiday meal, a newborn baby in a basket is left on her front porch. The baby girl is surrounded by a pool of blood, not hers, and an old pick-up is speeding away.
We all knew Delaney needs to reproduce; we had forgotten that her buddy, Tinkie, and Tinkie’s banker husband Oscar are childless and infertile. The effect of the baby on Tinkie is nearly pathological. As they all search for the birth mother, who may be dead but, if alive, is certainly in need of medical attention, Tinkie becomes obsessed with the child, takes over her care, buys her designer infant wear and other gear, even names her Libby, and flies with her to Boston Children’s Hospital to have the infant’s extra toe removed, all in the opening sequences.
Yes, the baby is polydactyl, an inherited condition which will certainly aid in tracing the family connections. I was, strangely, intrigued, not by the blood or the baby itself, but by Tinkie’s unhealthy fixation. Will she give back the baby, even if the birth mother is found? Will she flee to South America with baby Libby? This could end badly for Tinkie.
Of course, the gang rallies, and mysteries are solved, as they must be. Along the way Sarah Booth questions some students at the local high school and becomes acquainted with the Mississippi Delta version of “mean girls.” They are the same the world over. Sarah Booth continues to escape killing by her nemesis Gertrude, a crazed, hunted fugitive, and the three local swains all continue to pitch their woo.
Haines has me back, and I’m looking forward to the next one.
Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark with Don Noble.” A shorter form of this review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio.
