Mignon Franklin Ballard Libri

Things in the town of Stone's Throw, South Carolina, rarely get much spicier than the extra red pepper Lucy Nan Pilgrim sprinkles into her homemade cheese straws. So when an elderly but surprisingly childlike woman calling herself Shirley shows up on Lucy's doorstep looking for her mama, Lucy thinks it must be another of her friend Ellis's pranks. But Ellis doesn't know a thing about it, and what's more, the two suspect the woman might be Ellis's cousin, Florence, who disappeared as a child more than fifty years earlier.When the mysterious woman vanishes from Lucy's house, she and Ellis don't know what to think. And considering that Calpernia Hemphill, the town's theater and music aficionado, has just been found dead of an apparent fall from the tower at Bertram's Folly, life in Stone's Throw suddenly seems less safe than sinister.Luckily, guardian angel Augusta Goodnight shows up to calm Lucy's nerves (with a basket of strawberry muffins, of course). And not a moment too soon, because Shirley/Florence is found dead at the bottom of a steep flight of steps in the parking lot behind the Methodist church.She is not the last victim, and Ellis, whose inheritance could be threatened by the reappearance of her long-lost cousin, remains the number-one suspect. Augusta, Lucy, and the Thursday Morning Literary Society (which now meets on Monday afternoons) must use their heads---and a little bit of home cooking---to solve the mystery.

Prentice Dobson has just lost her job, her boyfriend, almost everything that has until now made her feel complete. To collect her thoughts and mourn her younger sister's recent passing, Prentice leaves the city for her small hometown in Georgia. But there is no comfort to be found in the beloved town of her youth-the town is aquiver with the news that her Uncle Faris' grave has been dug up, perhaps by vandals. And Prentice begins to doubt the simple reasons she has been given for her sister's death. She needs help, desperately. Just in the nick of time, in steps the baggage-toting, wisecracking guardian angel, Augusta Goodnight, sent down from Heaven for just such emergencies. Perhaps Heaven's best angel-sleuth, Augusta usually tends to Heaven's vast strawberry fields, but for people at their wit's end, like Prentice, she is always on-call. In her guardian angel, Prentice finds the strength she needs to investigate the lives of her dead relatives, although, in the case of Augusta Goodnight, "dead" is relative. Resourceful, amiable, and literally down-to-earth, Augusta helps Prentice try to both uncover the reasons for her sister's death and cover her uncle's grave. Mignon F. Ballard's charming and funny mystery, starring the unstoppable Augusta Goodnight, is the second in a series hailed by critics as "heavenly."