An Angel to Die For
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
She's just a temp but guardian angel Augusta Goodnight knows how to comfort in this second winning cozy in Ballard's newest series (Angel at Troublesome Creek), a welcome addition to the growing subgenre of mysteries featuring benign otherworldly characters. It's a bleak February homecoming for editor Prentice Dobson. Both her estranged younger sister, Maggie, and their father have recently died. Her mother has left their Georgia farm, Smokerise, because it was too lonely. To top it off, when Prentice heads to the family graveyard to make peace with Maggie, she finds a gaping hole where her wicked Uncle Faris had been buried 25 years earlier. Stunned, she hurries back to the cold farmhouse to call the sheriffDand is greeted with a crackling fire, hot chocolate and cinnamon toast made by Augusta, a "Dale Evans look-alike" who smells of strawberries . Prentice badly needs Augusta's help, for Uncle Faris's casket turns up bearing the body of a bleached blonde and Maggie has left a baby somewhere in Tennessee. Prentice and Augusta race to find baby Joey before the estranged family of Maggie's husband can. Back at Smokerise, meanwhile, bodies are piling upDalong with skeletons from the family closet. While the book's plotting is almost too dense, the humor is breezy, the tone light and the emotions realistic. Readers will really care about Prentice by book's end.
