Lady of Bones

 

Lady of Bones is the 24th Sarah Booth Delaney cozy mystery by Carolyn Haines. Released 14th June 2022 by Macmillan on their Minotaur imprint, it's 352 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately. 

This is an entertaining and engaging book in an engaging series by a competent writer. There's a strong paranormal element (the main character's sort of haunted by her great-great grandmother's nanny, a black woman named Jitty who has Opinions and lots of confusingly cryptic advice). MC Sarah Booth Delaney's also a PI and this installment sees her getting to the bottom of a string of Hallowe'en disappearances over the last 5 years of young women in the New Orleans area. She's soon entangled in cults with charismatic leaders, witchcraft, and possibly even human sacrifice. The settings are a living, breathing, immersive part of the story and the author does a superlative job with them.

The plotting is often meandering (it's a cozy with almost 400 pages), and there's quite a lot of "fluff" to add humor including a generous helping of cooing over best friend Tinkie's new baby, Maylin. The characters are quirky and appealing and there's a lot of goodwill and heart in the series. Ms. Haines is quite an adept author and I never found my interest waning, although there were a few eye-rollingly silly moments. The denouement and resolution weren't overly surprising, but they were satisfying. This series is dependably entertaining and fun, and this one is worth a read. The ensemble cast and returning characters mean that readers who are new to the story might want to read a few in the series prior to this one first, although it's simple enough to probably work well enough as a standalone. There are dogs, some cats, the language is clean, and there's light (off page) sexual content, but nothing explicit. The book is full of southernisms like "bless your heart" and "y'all" and more sweet-tea than you can shake a stick at.

Four stars. Cozy mystery comfort food.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.