Crime reporter Samantha Adams hits the Big Easy for Mardi Gras—and sticks around to catch a killer—in this “witty mystery [with] swift repartee” (Publishers Weekly). This Mardi Gras, crime reporter Samantha Adams is heading to New Orleans to visit her old college roommate Kitty. Together they’ll see a few parades, dance in the streets, and watch Kitty’s debutante niece be crowned queen of Comus. But the fun turns frightening when Sam witnesses a masked driver commit what looks like vehicular homicide. When the victim’s aristocratic family asks Sam to investigate, she finds a few more skeletons in the closet than they care to have uncovered. Teaming up with handsome insurance investigator Harry Zack, and enlisting the help of a voodoo priestess, Sam picks up a trail that leads her from the parade grounds into a dangerous web of deceit, old money, and murder.

The letter that arrived from Sam’s mother was postmarked Santa Fe, penned in her mother’s handwriting, and disclosed details only Johanna Adams could know. There was just one catch: Johanna Adams had been dead for thirty-four years. The mind-blowing missive could have been an entry from Sam’s latest book of bizarre anecdotes, American Weird—or an elaborate hoax. Either way, it instantly rekindled Sam’s impossible wish that her mother hadn’t really died in a plane crash when Sam was a child. Fueled by her journalistic instincts—and a daughter’s need for closure—Sam touches down among Santa Fe’s tourists and crystal gazers, jewelry shops and fast-food stands. But only when she summons the courage to knock on the door of Room 409 at the La Fonda Hotel does her surreal, mother-seeking adventure take off with no turning back.

Many bibliographers focus on women who write. Lawyer Barnett looks at women who detect, at women as sleuths and at the evolving roles of women in professions and in society. Excellent for all women's studies programs as well as for the mystery hound. Look at the popularity of such reading guides as Willetta Heising's Detecting Women (3rd ed. 0-9644593-7-X) or Amanda Cross' fiction (Honest Doubt 0-345-44011-0 11/00).

In her witty, southern-fried suspense novels, Sarah Shankman delivers nonstop action with a hilarious bite. Now she sends her acclaimed, irreverent heroine -- New Orleans writer Samantha Adams -- to a southwestern New Age hot spot, to unearth a secret past that was supposed to be six feet under. My dearest Sugar. I must see you. It's urgent. I need your help. The letter that arrived from Sam's mother was postmarked Santa Fe, penned in her mother's handwriting, and disclosed details only Johanna Adams could know. There was just one catch: Johanna Adams had been dead for thirty-four years. The mind-blowing missive could have been an entry from Sam's latest book of bizarre anecdotes, American Weird -- or an elaborate hoax. Either way, it instantly rekindled Sam's impossible wish that her mother hadn't really died in a plane crash when Sam was a child. Fueled by her journalistic instincts -- and a daughter's need for closure -- Sam touches down among Santa Fe's tourists and crystal gazers, jewelry shops and fast-food stands. But only when she summons the courage to knock on the door of Room 409 at the La Fonda Hotel does her surreal, mother-seeking adventure take off with no turning back.

Things get weirder than a peanut butter and banana sandwich when crime reporter Samantha Adams visits Elvis’s birthplace in this Southern mystery. Crime reporter Samantha Adams is working on a book called American Weird when her boyfriend, Harry, invites her to a barbecue cookoff in Tupelo, Mississippi. It’s hard to turn down a drive to Elvis’s birthplace in a genuine pink Cadillac. And as Harry points out, the King’s birthplace “ought to be lousy with weird.” As they soon discover, lousy is right—and weird is just the beginning. Also visiting Tupelo is Mary Ann McClanahan. After killing her worthless husband, Carlin, she discovered he was already married to a woman in Tupelo who’ll collect his life insurance—unless she does something about it. Meanwhile, the cookoff heats up when a contestant is zapped by his own electric smoker, and Samantha’s dog has to be rescued by a Biker for Jesus at the Elvis Memorial McDonald’s. But when Lovie Rakestraw, one of Elvis’s junior high classmates, is found electrocuted in her whirlpool, Sam is on the killer’s trail like a hound dog.