The Agatha Award Winner!

A refreshingly different heroine, retired Alabama schoolteacher Patricia Anne Hollowell, is drawn into a murder investigation after her colorful sister, Mary Alice, buys a country-western club. When the previous owner is found gruesomely murdered, the suspects include the club's cook, one of Patricia Anne's former prize students. Sprightly dialogue and a humorous eye for detail get this mystery off to a promising start. However, once the offbeat characters are introduced, they and their relationships fail to change or deepen. The dialogue becomes repetitive, and the telling domestic observations lapse into trivia. Clues accumulate more through coincidence than through investigation, with the conclusion weighed down by a welter of implausible connections and old secrets.

It's hard to believe practical, petite ex-schoolteacher Patricia Anne and amiable, ample-bodied, and outrageous Mary Alice are sisters, yet sibling rivalry has survived decades of good-natured disagreement about everything from husbands to hair color. No sooner do the Southern sisters discover a common interest in some local art, when they're arguing the artistic merits of some well-coiffured heads at a gallery opening. A few hours later, one of those pretty ladies ends up dead—with not a hair out of place. The other shows up on Patricia Anne's doorstep dazed, disheveled, and telling a wild tale of a narrow escape from some deadly cuts. Now the sisters are once again combing for clues to catch a killer with a bizarre style in art—and murder.

Mary Alice has spared nothing for her only daughter's wedding—from seventy-five yards of bridal train to gourmet food for over three hundred guests and enough glittering elegance to make Mary Alice think about finding herself a fourth rich husband to pay for it all.

Practical Patricia Anne has put away her aunt-of-the-bride blue chiffon and settled back into domesticity when fun-loving Mary Alice calls to say they have a post-wedding date with a genealogist from the groom's side of the family. Lunch is a fascinating lesson on the hazards of finding dirty linens in ancestral boudoirs that ends abruptly when their guest scurries off with the local judge, leaving the sisters with their mouths open—and finishing their luncheon companion's cheesecake—when the police arrive.

Their mysterious guest has taken a plunge from the ninth floor of the courthouse building—an apparent suicide. But given the scandals a nosy genealogist might have uncovered, the sisters are betting that some proud Southern family is making sure their shameful secrets stay buried … along with anyone who tries to dig them up.

Those hilarious southern sisters, who prove that sibling rivalry never ends, are heading for a vacation at the beach. Mary Alice's flamboyant behavior aside, serious, sensible Patricia Anne looks forward to relaxing at her sister's beachfront condo in Destin, Florida, so she kisses her ever-loving spouse Fred god-bye, reminds him to water the plants and feed the dog, and the girls head south for some fun in the sun.

Mary Alice loses no time in making the acquaintance of just about everyone in sight, so watching the sun go down on the beautiful shores of the Gulf of Mexico is a welcome respite as far as Patricia Anne is concerned … until a dead body washes up in the waves and the victim turns out to be one of Mary Alice's newfound friends. With no witnesses to the crime except a few great blue herons, the sisters have no choice but to bypass the clueless police and follow their own instinct to find the killer. Before long they're on a murky trail of dirty real-estate deals, giant turtle habitats, and a sea of evidence pointing to a mammoth motive for murderer.

Patricia Anne can't imagine why Mary Alice is in such an uproar over her son Ray's new bride. Sunshine Dabbs is “Cute as can be, even if she is a bit unconventional,” which should hardly come as a shock to Mary Alice given that she's the one who raised her boy. But with all her motherly instincts, Mary Alice is sure that this sweet little blonde Barbie doll--who met her son in Bora Bora after she won the trip on Wheel of Fortune--thinks she's found herself a fortune in Ray's hefty wallet.

The sisters can't wait to get a look at Sunshine's family, and quite a look it turns out to be. As soon as Meemaw Turkett invites Mary Alice and Patricia Anne into her cozy trailer on the family compound they stumble over a corpse, and Meemaw's best hog butchering knife is stuck in its chest. Meemaw, a Cabbage Patch look-alike and Sunshine's grandmother, guardian, and the family matriarch is shocked to pieces and immediately summons the family to her trailer. Pawpaw, a lovable bearded grump, has his own trailer, and their grown kids each enjoy a private home-away-from-home on the five-trailer compound.

The discovery of the mysterious body brings in Mary Alice's nemesis, good ol' boy Sheriff Reuse, who, she knows from her experience at the Skoot 'n' Boot, is nothing but trouble. Within minutes, the compound is strewn with a weird collection of friends, neighbors and relatives. There's Meemaw's spooky channeler, ready to give guidance as needed; Sunshine's jilted boyfriend skulking around; a bunch of dogs ready to attack...and Kerrigan, Sunshine's mostly absentee mama, who stars in the kind of video flicks that might even shock Mary Alice.

Lefty Award Nominee

Patricia Anne would swear that either she or her sister Mary Alice were switched at birth, except they were both born at home.Flashy, flirtatious Mary Alice is one foot taller, twice the body weight of Patricia Anne, and three times as likely to do something completely off the wall. But now Mary Alice's impulsive behavior has landed them both in the Birmingham jail!

It all begins with a call from their good friend Mitzi Phizer, who's starting an investment club—kind of a Beardstown Ladies group. Patricia Anne is willing to make a small, conservative investment in a thriving chain of HMOs; Mary Alice is hot to trot to put her money on Viagra. But before the club idea gets off the ground, the sisters spot Mitzi's supposedly faithful husband in a chummy little huddle with a redhead—and the next thing they know, Arthur is accused of murdering the mystery woman. Nothing about the whole sordid story fits the kind, gentle Arthur, and Patricia Anne is doing her best to console her good friends. But when their house catches on fire, and Arthur is shot in a place that won't allow him to even sit down at his own murder trial, the sisters know they have to stand up for the poor fellow. And that means checking out everyone—from low-down cads to highbrow bank presidents—to find a no-good, gun-toting arsonist who believes big money is to kill for.

Though unalike as snowflakes, sisters Patricia Anne and Mary Alice share a sympathetic heart for their distraught cousin Luke—known affectionately in his boyhood as "Pukey Lukey," because of his penchant for getting sick in moving vehicles. Luke is desperate to hunt down Virginia, his wife of forty years, who has run off with a housepainter/snake-handling preacher named "Monk." And the sisters have graciously agreed to accompany their stricken kinsman on his search … .in Luke's car, of course.

But, while practical "Mouse" and flamboyant "Sister" are unable to find their runaway cousin-in-law among the asp-loving faithful on Chandler Mountain, they do manage to stumble upon the corpse of a pretty young redhead who was prematurely sent to her eternal reward. And before you can say "anaconda," they are hot on the serpentine trail of a killer who'd like nothing better than to sink a pair of poisonous fangs into two meddling Southern sisters!

The Southland's most mismatched set of siblings -- flamboyant Mary Alice and prim and proper Patricia Anne -- are back and ready to boogie in a King-sized story of hip-shaking mayhem and murder most tacky.

At an age when most women are slowing down, oversized, over-the-top Mary Alice a.k.a. "Sister" -- is always on the lookout for the next good time...and the next husband. Now Sheriff Virgil Stuckey is in line to become Sister's Mister Number Four, which has practical Patricia Anne's level head filling to the brim with a million and one prewedding details. But first there is another important occasion the sisters are looking forward to attending: a gala benefit to raise money for restoring one of Birmingham's unnatural wonders, a towering metal monument to the god Vulcan lately fallen into disrepair. The grand finale is thirty sequined Elvis impersonators high kicking in unison. Enjoying the show from the front row, Patricia Anne and Mary Alice are in the line of fire when one of the dancing Kings keels over dead right into the bandstand. It seems this Elvis clone, one Griffin Mooncloth, has not only left the building ... he's left this life!

At first the sisters figure that the cause of death was a massive heart attack induced by one too many pelvic gyrations. But the unfortunate Mooncloth's very dramatic demise is soon discovered to be the result of a switchblade knife plunged into his back. The plot thickens when the murder weapon is discovered in Patricia Anne's very sensible purse. The perennially law-abiding "Mouse" is understandably all shook up -- and mortified to find herself the prime suspect in this bizarre case of Elvis elimination. And with Mary Alice's well-coiffed head in a sunflower-yellow-and-magenta cloud over her impending nuptials, Patricia Anne's the one who will have to get herself out of very hot water indeed.