What Are You Wearing to Die?: A Thoroughly Southern Mystery

by: Patricia Sprinkle

Published by: An Obsidian Mystery / New American Library / Penguin Group

Reviewed by Kathy Perschmann

The tenth in the cozy “Thoroughly Southern Mystery” series, this one has an especially searing climax.

Magistrate MacLaren (Mac) Yarbrough is working in the family business (Yarbrough Feed, Seed and Nursery) when her husband Joe Riddley comes in and handcuffs her to her huge oak desk–to prevent her from meddling in another murder, he claims.

But on the surface the death of Starr Knight just seems a tragic car accident. Later the medical investigation shows her death to be caused by a particularly savage beating.

The young Starr had lived a wild life, drinking and drugs as a teen, then a pregnancy that straightened her out and sent her home to live with her father, Trevor, and her toddler, Bradley. Lately she had left home, lost Bradley to foster care, and become involved with drugs again, though the talk was that she had contacted the DEA to turn in her suppliers. Had they killed her?

Mac and Joe help the police a bit in the investigation into Starr’s death. In a small town like Hopemore, Georgia, everyone knows everyone else, and life stories are common knowledge. Over the ensuing months good forensic work discovers the bat used to beat her and links fingerprints on her body and the bat to two nasty meth–addicted druggies.

Then another young woman is found dead, this one Trevor Knight’s assistant in his taxidermy business, Robin. She had left her two young daughters alone in her house and gone off in a totally atypical outfit, a red cocktail dress, to the motel where the taxidermy convention was being held in Hopemore. She was found in an elevator with a broken neck.

Author Sprinkle’s MacLaren is a wonderfully kind and caring grandmotherly woman who works to help find solutions to the problems in the lives of the people around her. The changing economic climate in Hope County is chronicled as well, as the big chain stores and restaurants move into the area, following the wave of retirees moving to a warmer clime. Small-town business is suffering, and the whole community is affected by the changes.

Armchair Interviews says: Patricia Sprinkle writes a very good cozy mystery.

Author’s Web site: http://www.PatriciaSprinkle.com