This title is a krimi set in contemporary rural Georgia in the borderlands with South Carolina and Florida in a small town whose chief denizens are the Chandler family. Belay those stereotypes!
The Chandler sons are an actor of great ambition and little talent, and a physicist who is proud member of the nerd fraternity. Captain Grandfather spend forty years at sea in the navy. Aunt Amanda, had she been available, would surely have repulsed General Sherman at Atlanta with her wit, skill, forceful personality, and the endless supply of contacts in the right places.
Returning to this fold is niece Elizabeth MacPherson, a forensic anthropologist, to be married in the ancestral home. Her unreconstructed hippie parents continue to smoke dope in Hawaii, trusting all arrangements to the Chandlers in residence.
Her beau is a Scots marine biologist; they pass the time with discussions of decomposition rates of flesh.
The plot thickens when local Emmett Martin dies…for a second time. I will say no more to spoil the plot. Suffice it to say it is clever, rIght down to the Biblical nomenclature.
McCrumb is a dab hand at delineating a cast of characters as individuals from all those named above to the several sheriffs and deputies, the scientific colleagues of each of the principals, and the townspeople, including the whole-earth tree-hugging tofu-eating caterers for the wedding whom Amanda suborns into serving flesh. Even the Queen of England and a princess make an appearance!
Sharyn McCrumb
This is the second in the series centring on Elizabeth MacPherson, and I will lay in the first. However not sure about continuing thereafter. With neither zombies nor bimbos, it does not reach the heights of the other books of hers I have read. Being a one-woman industry she also has several other lines of fiction.
Agatha Christie said the secret to finishing was to start. McCrumb got the message.
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