The Goodbye Body: A Claire Malloy Mystery FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Claire Malloy runs a bookstore in the normally quiet college town of Farberville, Arkansas - an enterprise that provides a verging-on-meager living for her and her deeply sarcastic teenage daughter, Caron. When emergency work forces Claire and Caron to abandon their apartment for a few weeks, they are in no financial position to put themselves up in style, and so Claire is thrilled to accept a customer's offer to let them stay at her well-stocked, well-equipped, palatial home while she is traveling." Of course, nothing is ever that easy. No sooner do Claire and Caron ensconce themselves than disquieting events start to occur: Dubious people show up looking for the "traveling" owner of the house; the owner herself turns out not to be who she claimed and is now seemingly on the run; and a dead body keeps turning up - and subsequently disappearing - around the grounds of the house. Claire is determined, for once, to stay out of the mysterious doings, but her hand is finally forced when the disappearing body turns out to be only the first corpse to turn up.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
When Claire Malloy and teenage daughter Caron find rats in their apartment, thanks to the trash-laden downstairs neighbors, it's time to find somewhere else to live, at least temporarily, in the amateur sleuth's fresh and funny 15th outing (after 2002's Out on a Limb). Dolly Goforth, good Samaritan and relative newcomer to Farberville, Ark., comes to the rescue, offering her palatial home as a refuge while she travels. Soon after Claire and Caron and her best friend Inez settle in, however, the girls find a body behind the gazebo. When the police arrive to investigate, the body's gone. Various people keep showing up and asking for Dolly, including two young women who claim Dolly invited them to visit her anytime. Getting in touch with Dolly proves difficult, and when the body keeps turning up only to disappear again, Claire is more determined than ever to resolve this nefarious affair. Hess handles the complicated plot with consummate ease, and her trademark humor is stamped on every page. Fans of the long-running series will find much to entertain, including a decision Claire makes that will affect her relationship with longtime beau Peter Rosen. (Apr. 18) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Claire Malloy (Out on a Limb, 2002, etc.) house-sits for a friend who turns out to be one shady lady. It seems like such a sweet deal. While her landlord renders her modest flat rodent-free, bookseller Claire, her daughter Caron, and Caron's best friend Inez get to stay in Dolly Goforth's swank digs, with unlimited use of the pool, the widescreen TV, and a freezer stocked with goodies for the grill. The only catch is that to reach the beef, they have to dig past a corpse that after two brief appearances on the lawn comes to rest smack atop Dolly's stash of New York strip steaks. Meanwhile, Claire's frantic attempts to reach Dolly at her sister's in Arizona stall, and Dolly's obnoxious nieces Madison and Sara Louise arrive, planning to spend their days lounging by the pool in their teensy-weensy bikinis while the local garage boys sweat over their Maserati. Nosy neighbors Daniel and Lucy Hood show up with brownies; bird-watcher Gary Billings hits on Claire; and a mysterious assailant knocks her out and trashes her shop. Before she and her boyfriend Peter Rosen solve the case, Madison and Sara Louise will both disappear, Caron and Inez will learn the tango, and Claire's dining room will be littered with flower arrangements no local florist will admit delivering. A deluge of puzzlement, somewhat unevenly distributed, but leavened as always by Claire's ready wit.
Home
