Them Bones, Buried Bones, and Splintered Bones
by Carolyn Haines

It seems there is always room for yet one more good writer of murder mysteries. Readers devour them like potato chips, and after the readers fall in love with the detective, whether the detective is a Poirot or a Miss Marple or a V. I. Warshawski, readers wait for the next one, buy it and eat it up. In Alabama we have enjoyed the mysteries of Anne George and more recently Mike Stewart. Now Carolyn Haines of Semmes, Alabama, has joined their ranks.

Haines has served a long apprenticeship as a fiction writer. She is the author of two "straight" novels, The Summer of the Redeemers and Touched, and the author of fifteen Harlequin mysteries in which the detective, so to speak, is a cat, that is a feline, a "familiar."

Now she has, in rapid order, published the first three novels in the Bones Series. Them Bones, 1999, Buried Bones, 2000, and Splintered Bones, 2002.

The first requirement for a mystery series is an interesting detective, and Haines has created a likeable, mildly quirky, amateur sleuth in Sarah Booth Delaney, called, as all good Southerners know, Sarah Booth.

Sarah Booth, 33 years old, has returned to her home place, Dahlia House, in Zinnia, Mississippi, Sunflower County. Yes, it is all very floral.

Sarah Booth, who has been working, not very successfully, at an acting career in New York City for over ten years, returns home to discover that the family finances are in a shambles and unless she moves fast, Dahlia House will be lost to the auction block. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so she kidnaps Chablis, the miniature terrier of a girlhood friend, Tinkie Bellcase Richmond, sends a ransom note demanding five thousand dollars, and then is hired by Tinkie to deliver the ransom to the imaginary dognappers. She completes this chore easily, of course, and her career as a private detective is launched.

Sarah Booth has a full complement of oddities. She is a D. G., which means both Delta Girl and Daddy's Girl. She was raised in the local country club, trained to appear weak and submissive while actually she is that formidable creature, the Steel Magnolia. Sarah Booth is afflicted: "women in my family have a penchant for madness and mysterious womb disorders." by this she means, partly, that her biological clock is ticking loudly and she wants very much to marry and/or reproduce.

Haines has also given Sarah Booth an extra erogenous zone. When aroused, her thumb tingles. When a date, the local banker Harold Erkwell, actually puts her thumb to his lips, it tingles unbearably. Sarah Booth's romantic escapades, very tastefully handled, are a delightful part of these novels.

Sarah Booth also has a sidekick, a Watson, so to speak, with whom she discusses the cases candidly. She can be perfectly candid because the sidekick, Jitty, is a ghost, the black nanny of Sarah Booth's great-great-grandmother. Jitty died in 1904 but has never left the house. She serves as comic relief, indeed, but also as a kind of alter-ego, Sarah Booth's unconscious mind and sounding board. Stealing the dog was her idea. She does not want strangers to own Dahlia House either. She has to live there, sort of.

As the novels progress, Sarah Booth organizes a kind of informal team, a group of operatives, her own Baker Street Irregulars, to aid her in different ways with her investigations.

First she takes on Tinkie, who never does find out about the dog business. Tinkie is married to a powerful, informed man and can gather information in her own bedroom and at the country club. She is a Daddy's Girl in good standing.

Cecily--called Cece--is the society reporter at the Zinnia Dispatch. As such, she knows all the gossip, and what she doesn't know, she knows how to find out. Cece is also a good researcher, in the paper's morgue and around the state. She also can offer an unusual dual perspective to this all-female group of sleuths, because Cece, who is envied by all for her fine slim hips, beautiful teeth, flawless make-up and hair, used to be Cecil, before some serious alterations. She has what we might call the ex-male point of view

Millie, owner of Millie's Cafe in Zinnia, is useful as a listening post. The businessmen in town all gather in the mornings, women later in the day, and Millie is mostly regarded as just part of the background. The customers speak frankly; Millie listens and reports. Another childhood friend, once known as Tammy Odom, is now Madame Tomeka, Zinnia's resident psychic. She adds information from beyond.

My favorite of the three novels is the second, Buried Bones, in which and old Zinnian, Lawrence Ambrose, based on the Mobile writer Eugene Walter, has returned after decades in Europe to write his memoirs. He has led a very unconventional life and many many people are nervous about what he may reveal. He is, naturally, a dead man.

In the latest, Splintered Bones, Haines sets the action on a horse-breeding farm and makes use of her expertise with horses. Dick Francis aficionados will enjoy.

Read these in any order. The Bones mysteries are engaging, not too gruesome, and lots of fun.