Jiffy’s purpose in haunting Sarah seems to be encouraging her to marry or produce the Delaney heir. Jitty’s witticisms and philosophies offer a unique, humorous and refreshing point of view. It is an innovative plot device that provides conflict and shapes the action by pitting Jitty’s pragmatic viewpoints against Sarah’s more ardent approach to the many roadblocks in her life.

Sarah’s desperation to save Dahlia House leads her to take Jitty’s advice to kidnap her friend Tinkie’s dog and hold her for ransom. Incongruously, her first act of larceny pays off and, shame and guilt aside, Sarah nets a cool five thousand dollars, enormous thanks, and an offer to investigate another delicate situation.

When the local clairvoyant tells Tinkie a dark man from her past is coming, she intuits the man to be Hamilton Garrett the Fifth, her first love. He is rumored to have killed his mother almost twenty years ago because he discovered she was responsible for his father’s murder. Everything had been hushed up, he had been sent to Paris to live, and his sister had been placed in a sanatorium.

Although Tinkie is now married to the president of the bank, she wants to quit living her life based on perceptions and gossip and she hires Sarah to find answers. Tinkie says Sarah understands the code of the old and wealthy families in the Deep South, and she is sure that whatever Sarah finds out, she will keep secret. The offer to pay Sarah ten thousand dollars down, in addition to her expenses, and adding another ten thousand after she completes the job, has Sarah hooked.

In order to dig into the past, Sarah creates the excuse that she is writing a mystery, but she receives numerous warnings to stop. Each bit of information she uncovers raises more questions. Did Hamilton the Fifth get away with murder? After another body turns up and Sarah is set up to look like the perpetrator, she must quickly find the truth before she is put behind bars.

Everything in the book works, particularly the intimate look at a bygone era in the South where old and wealthy families had a privileged life as long as they maintained the conventions, faultless manners, and protocol of the gentility. All the characters in the small town of Zinnia quickly become family, incorporating the good, the bad, and the ugly traits of relatives all over the world.

Sarah is a beguiling heroine and describes herself perfectly: “clever, imaginative and equipped with a certain infallible female logic.” Not only is she hard at work solving the case, considering whether to accept a marriage proposal from her banker boyfriend, and enthralled by the new man in town, but she is also turning into a first-rate detective on the fly. She faces the consequences of her actions head-on and fights for what she wants, while at the same time she is sensitive to the needs of others.

The end of the story comes all too soon and contains elements of comedy and adventure, along with an unpredictable finale, because Zinnia is a small town where justice is not always defined by the standard legal system and moral righteousness may take other forms.

--Monica Pope