Doghousesmall
Doghouse
3124791
Tall Tail
(2016)
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Author: Rita Mae Brown
Publisher: Bantam Books
Language: en
Series: Mrs Murphy #25
ISBN: 9780553392487
Genre: Detective and mystery fiction, Fiction, Humorous Fiction

I

n this fast-paced mystery by Rita Mae Brown and her feline coauthor, Sneaky Pie Brown, Mary Minor "Harry" Haristeen and her animal friends seek to solve a whodunit rooted in 18th-century Virginia - uncovering a shocking secret that refuses to stay buried.

At any moment a perfect summer day in Crozet, Virginia - nestled within the Blue Ridge Mountains - might turn stormy and tempestuous, as Harry knows too well when a squall suddenly sweeps in. In a blink Harry's pickup nearly collides with a careening red car that then swerves into a ditch. Harry recognizes the dead driver slumped over the vehicle's steering wheel: Barbara Leader was nurse and confidante to former Virginia governor Sam Holloway.

Though Barbara's death is ruled a heart attack, dissenting opinions abound. After all, she was the picture of health, which gives Harry and her four-legged companions pause. A baffling break-in at a local business leads Harry to further suspect that a person with malevolent intent lurks just out of sight: Something evil is afoot.

As it happens, Barbara died in the shadow of the local cemetery's statue of the Avenging Angel. Just below that imposing funereal monument lie the remains of one Francisco Selisse, brutally murdered in 1784. Harry's present-day sleuthing draws her back to Virginia's slave-holding past and the hunt for Selisse's killer. Now it's up to Harry and her furry detectives - Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, and Tee Tucker - to expose the bitter truth, even if it means staring into the unforgiving eyes of history and cornering a callous killer poised to pounce.

Returning to Virginia's post-revolutionary history and to characters introduced in Tail Gait, the story follows the Garth sisters and their husbands, neighbors to a brutal slaveholder whose murder at the hands of one of his slaves is neither unexpected nor unwarranted, especially when the impetus was an attack on that slave's wife. The sisters manage to smuggle the fugitive to safety in York, Pennsylvania, while ensuring that the circumstances underlying the entire ordeal stay long buried. Until now. Harry and her animal companions come closer to drawing a link between the past and the present. And in this centuries-spanning caper, they will discover that hiding who you really are may have mortal consequences ... As the questions surrounding."--
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