Sarah Shankman has been acclaimed as an "Elmore Leonard with a Southern accent" (Lia Matera), who "catches the dark, joyous eccentricity of the American South better than any writer since Pat Conroy" (Anne Rivers Siddons). Now Sarah Shankman's savvy amateur sleuth and former crime reporter Samantha Adams is back, in the thick of the most rollicking mystery ever to trouble the waters of Arkansas's self-proclaimed Sin City.... Her faithful dog riding shotgun, Sam Adams hugged the rain-slick two-lane and sang the blues all five hundred miles from New Orleans to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where truth-talking Olive Adair - sole proprietor of the Gas 'N Grub just outside town - was the first person all day to lift her spirits. Sam's sexy boyfriend, Harry, had just taken up with someone appallingly young and impossibly skinny. Sam was roaring into Hot Springs to cry on the shoulder of her best friend, Kitty - on hand for their lottery-winning-friend Jinx Watson's big blowout engagement party. Sam still hadn't forgotten that long ago Jinx stole her best beau, and amidst the partygoers' big hair and bugle beads, she was not exactly sorry to note that twice-divorced Jinx's new fiance sported a balding head, a cigar, and a name like a pool hustler. But when the groom is kidnapped for a million-dollar ransom, and delightful old Olive Adair simply disappears, Sam can't help but sally out to investigate - if only to seek Olive, and grist for American Weird, the book she's writing. Olive's Gas 'N Grub is deserted except for the owner's exceedingly gracious ex-con grandson, and a hound whose tracking stamina is second only to her desire to find Olive. At McClard's Barbecue, Jinx is hiding behind movie-star sunglasses and nursing a smoldering rage at her kidnapped hubby-to-be. Meanwhile, a beautiful young grifter lurks around the Palace Hotel; Hot Springs natives can't stop gabbing about a mysterious personage called You Know Who; and Sam is beginning to think that "weird" is like
