In the midst of a cook-off at a posh spa, southern PI Sarah Booth Delaney gets embroiled in a juicy murder in the latest mystery from Carolyn Haines For many years Jitty, Dahlia House’s resident ghost, has dreamed that Sarah Booth Delaney would have a child to inherit the family’s ancestral home. Sarah Booth has always had reservations about being a parent. There was her work as an actress and PI, taking care of the house, not to mention finding the right man. But when Jitty’s dream finally looks like it’s going to come true, Sarah Booth is crushed when it doesn’t. Depressed, unable to act or investigate, Sarah Booth finally allows her best friend to whisk her away for a luxurious weekend vacation at a special spa and cooking school. The pampering and food go a long way toward making her feel like her old self, but there’s another welcome distraction—there’s a beauty contest/cook-off going on to find the spa’s next spokesperson, and watching the drama really takes her mind off of her woes. Sarah finds the backbiting to be great fun—until the heated competition boils over, the top contender is poisoned, and the prime suspect hires Sarah Booth to clear her name. Between swimsuit competitions and soufflés, Sarah Booth Delaney and her best friend and partner, Tinkie, must find out which of the ambitious young ladies is to blame in Bone Appetit , the latest in Carolyn Haines’s delightfully Southern cozy mystery series. Deeply depressed by the loss of her unborn child, Sarah Booth Delaney agrees to leave her plantation home, Dahlia House, and attend the Viking Cooking School with her best friend, Tinkie, in an effort to begin to heal. They arrive at the beginning of the Miss Viking Beauty Contest and Spokesperson Competition and add the pageant events to their schedule. But the pageant is disrupted when contestants are killed. Hedy Lamarr Blackledge, a contestant considered the prime suspect in the murders, asks Sarah and Tinkie, owners of the Delaney Detective Agency, to investigate. When Sarah hesitates to accept the case, Tinkie manipulates her into agreeing, a decision that leads to grave consequences. Assisted by Dahlia House’s resident ghost, Jitty, Sarah is drawn into the case and begins to recover from her loss. Details of life in the South, beauty pageants, and cooking are woven throughout the story, which will appeal to readers who enjoyed Sarah Shankman’s She Walks in Beauty (1992), also set at a beauty pageant. --Sue OBrien Carolyn Haines is the author of the Sarah Booth Delaney Mysteries, including Greedy Bones and Bones of a Feather . She is the recipient of both the Harper Lee Distinguished Writing Award and the Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence. Before writing fiction, she worked for several years as a journalist, and first visited the Delta, the setting for her mysteries, to do a newspaper story on Parchman State Prison. Born and raised in Mississippi, she now lives in Alabama on a farm with more dogs, cats, and horses than she can possibly keep track of. 1 Spring smote the Delta and fled before the onslaught of May heat. A thick haze of warmth hangs over the fields and the rivers, blanketing the land and the cotton bursting from the ground, green and vibrant. Hope is alive here, where farming is still a way of life. To my shame, hope has died in me. The loss of my child, my potential son or daughter, has done something to me, and I’m afraid it can’t be repaired. While the cotton is growing and my partner’s husband, Oscar, and Deputy Gordon Walters have both fully recovered from the “plague” that nearly killed them, I have not fared so well. At least not emotionally. Doc says my body is healing fine. No permanent internal injuries, and my broken arm is all but mended. There should be no ill effects. So what’s wrong with my heart? Dahlia House, my family home, echoes with loneliness. The familiar rooms are too big and empty in a way I never noticed. Perhaps this malaise of melancholy is hormone induced, as Cece Dee Falcon, my transgender friend who is an authority on the tricky role of endocrine chemistry, tells me. She assures me that my body will balance itself and that time will buffer this loss. I wish I could trust her words. There are no known Delaney genes for moping, yet I can’t seem to stop. Songwriter Jesse Winchester says it best, it takes “nothing to pity yourself—but it’s dangerous fun.” Unable to endure the shadows of Dahlia House, I’ve taken myself outdoors into the heat laden with the smell of summer. The scent of this sun-warmed land—the taste of it—is imprinted on my DNA. These fields have been my solace through so many losses, but I find no comfort here now. I walk to the oak grove behind the Delaney Family Cemetery—the place I saw my dead mother in a dream or vision or visit from the spirit world. She assured me I would recover from this miscarriage. I hope she’ll return today to guide me to that path, but I know she won’t. She’s warned me about lingering in