“Ode to the Bones” is number 30 in this much-loved series and is solidly rooted in the Mississippi Delta. The action is sparked by a missing persons case. Tinkie’s husband, Oscar, the president of the Zinnia National Bank, hires Sarah Booth and Tinkie to find Danny Anderson, who has gone missing.
Danny, a preternaturally virtuous fellow by all accounts, cannot repay his bank loan and so might lose the family land. He is depressed and possibly suicidal. Oscar, a banker but, nevertheless, a kind-hearted man, is worried.
The two sleuths begin searching. A lot of the action takes place on and around the Tallahatchie River, especially near the bridge made famous in the Bobby Gentry song. There Billy Joe McAllister did or did not throw something off the Tallahatchie Bridge.
On that bridge, Sarah Booth herself sees an apparition, a woman in white. Of course, she believes in ghosts. How could she not? Her live-in ghost, the antebellum Jitty, is part of her everyday life.
The river’s sandbanks also figure large because it just may be that Danny and some friends are searching for buried treasure there. Legend says a gang, the Nortons, robbed Columbine Plantation and presumably hid the loot. If Danny can find that hoard, he can save his land and some of the land of other desperate farmers.
“Bones” books often have a contemporary issue or cause to promote—usually it is a variety of feminism. Here it is the plight of farmers: seed, diesel and fertilizer costs are high. Climate change has brought unusual drought. A new, positively Dickensian villain appears: financier Levi Butler, who moves around the Delta offering to buy troubled farms for pennies on the dollar. He should have a mustache to twirl.
Searching for Danny, interviewing a score of locals, Sarah Booth unearths heaps of gossip. Did he have an affair with Pearl, the preacher’s wife? Besides all the secret lusts and unrequited loves, there are armed robberies, shootings on the river, even murders, all while looking for the missing Danny. The novel is packed with incident, but is still somewhat repetitive. In too many scenes, Sarah Booth goes over what she and Tinkie have learned thus far. The reader already knows.
Sarah Booth and Coleman Peters, the hunky sheriff, live passionately together now at Dahlia House and are converts to vegetarianism. In the evening they sip Jack Daniels on the rocks while Coleman grills cabbage steaks and black bean burgers.
After the mysteries of the day are solved, the story takes a peculiar twist. Coleman seems a little smitten with Brigette McEachern, supermodel, and Gertrude Stromm, Sarah Booth’s nemesis, thought dead, reappears. Suddenly there is doubt about what really happened to her parents and whether she can trust anyone. The novel ends with Sarah Booth in a paroxysm of anger and despair.
