“Lady of Bones: A Novel”
Author: Carolyn Haines
Publisher: Minotaur Books, St. Martin’s
Pages: 352
Price: $26.99
Haines’s Latest Is a Scary Halloween Story
Well, here it is, the 24th Bones mystery.
Carolyn Haines of Semmes, Alabama is surely one of the most productive, indeed relentless, mystery writers of all time.
The novel opens at Hilltop, the home of Tinkie Bellcase Richmond, Sarah Booth’s business partner, in Zinnia, in the Mississippi delta.
Tinkie, after unspeakable difficulties, has had her baby, Maylin. In fact, in the previous novel, Tinkie delivered Maylin, two days earlier, in a neighbor’s back yard. Now the gang is decorating the house for a Halloween party.
The festive air is lost when Frances Moore, called Frankie, arrives to seek help. Frankie was Sarah Booth’s mother’s best friend, and now Frankie’s daughter, Christa, is missing, abducted in New Orleans where she had been working as a free-lance journalist.
A very odd kidnapping: there is no ransom note. Christa had been searching for her roommate Britta, a German girl, a painter, who had gone missing. We soon learn that Britta had been looking for a German friend of hers, Gerri.
Horrible to contemplate, but the attractive girls might have been abducted and sold into the sex-trafficking business, so Sarah Booth, her fiancé Sheriff Coleman Peters, and Cece the newspaper reporter head for New Orleans.
Tinkie, breastfeeding, stays behind for a while, helping with computer research, although she can’t resist joining the hunt and heads to N.O. with Maylin, in designer onesies, in tow.
The plot thickens fast. It seems Christa had been investigating a cult named, to my delight, People of Earth, POE. Sarah Booth is reminded immediately of Edgar Allen Poe, who was himself obsessed with death, eternity, eternal beauty and the afterlife. We are told that Poe “understood the allure of death, how the promise of sweet relief could tempt. He often wrote of cheating death and of immortality.”
The leaders of People of Earth are taking in enormous sums from their members, promising not only eternal life, but to be taken up, now, in their perfect bloom of youth, to remain perfect and youthful forever.
Reference is made to Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who “was said to bathe in and drink the blood of young virgins”—perhaps 650 of them—"to preserve her youth.”
Here, too, some blood sacrifices may be required, but not virgins necessarily—that would be asking too much—just young and beautiful women.
The grand ceremony, if there is to be one, will probably be held on Halloween at midnight because that is the moment in the year when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest.
This is scary business, as a Halloween novel should be.
There is not much time. Sarah Booth and her gang set to work, understanding that N.O. is like a foreign country in some regards, a place of voodoo, magic, spells and superstition. They search old deserted mansions, investigate exotic and overgrown gardens. There are clues, suspects, including some devastatingly handsome men, abductions and violence.
In the course of things we meet a rich plastic surgeon named Leo who has been in the youth and immortality business for years. He is magnificently self-centered and haughty. His horrible wife, actually named Pouty, is to Leo’s dismay, a member of POE, and tells Sarah Booth that Leo hates People of Earth because they offer the ultimate competition, with no surgery.
The head of POE is Rhianna, a really wicked villainess if there ever was one.
She is gorgeous of course, but also vicious, cruel, greedy, heartless, without the smallest scruple,
In the midst of all this death business, from time to time everyone stops to admire the baby, Maylin, who in her purity and perfection represents humans’ best hope for immortality.
Don Noble’s newest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson, and eleven other Alabama authors.
