Button Sunday

May is “Get Caught Reading Month,” and while June doesn’t begin until Wednesday, I’m pretty sure I won’t finish the 500-page book I’m reading by then (I’m not quite halfway through it).

Though I didn’t get a lot of reading done in May (I made progress writing the Neverending Saga!), here are the writers who kept me company through the month.

Small-town magic happens to three “accidental” visitors in these Three Left Turns to Nowhere novellas, one each from ‘Nathan Burgoine, J. Marshall Freeman, and Jeffrey Ricker.

The Devil’s Bones is the twenty-first novel in Carolyn Haines’s Sarah Booth Delaney Mysteries. There is no shortage of suspects as deaths and mishaps pile up during a girlfriends’ weekend in Lucedale, Mississippi.

A short novella (No. 21.5) from the Sarah Booth Delaney Mysteries includes a found child, a mystery from the past, and a bit of magic.

A Garland of Bones, set just before Christmas in Columbus, Mississippi, tells the story of Sarah Booth Delaney, with her lover and their friends, mired deep in the vindictive acts of a group of cheating couples and social climbers.

Independent Bones presents a group of murders connected to domestic violence and toxic masculinity, while the favorite humans and animals of Sarah Booth’s world provide insights, friendship, and romance.

I read the fourth book in Carolyn Haines’s Pluto’s Snitch Series, A Visitation of Angels. Pluto’s Snitch is a detective agency formed just after World War I, but there’s a twist–the two partners, Raissa and Reginald, investigate crimes involving the paranormal, including hauntings, possession, and the occult. This latest offering has some badass, or maybe just bad, angels, and an evil man who holds a town in his grip.

That catches me up on the many Haines novels I’d downloaded during the part of the pandemic when I wasn’t reading. Good thing there’s another Sarah Booth Delaney mystery coming out in June, because I want more!

Finally, sending birthday wishes to one of the extraordinary people from my past. I doubt you’ll ever see this, but if good thoughts bring happiness, you’ll have a happy birthday.