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FRANKLY, MY DEAR, I'M DEAD
by Livia J. Washburn
Kensington, November 2008
224 pages
$22.00
ISBN: 0758225660


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Delilah Dickinson is not having a wonderful day. Her first tour, organized around Margaret Mitchell and GONE WITH THE WIND, is just beginning. For some reason, most of her staff is related to her in one way or another. She also has her twin nieces, twin teenage nieces, along for the ride. No pressure. And nobody will give her two minutes to herself, two minutes to convince herself that this venture will work and she won't have another failure to contemplate. Not a good start to the day.

Of course things do get better. The twins stop fighting for a good ten minutes. The telephone company will have the phones in by the end of the day. Everyone shows up for the tour, including the bus and the driver. There is a minor skirmish when one person on the tour accuses another of trying to steal something, but that is resolved fairly quickly. Segue to the plantation portion of the tour.

Edmond Ralston has taken a plantation and made it into a pseudo-Tara, complete with the Tarleton Twins, Ashley Wilkes, Melanie, Rhett, and Scarlett. The people on the tour get to see the various parts of the plantation, attend a ball, and spend the night. Ralston plays Gordon O'Hara, which makes sense both from a business perspective and because he bears a slight resemblance to Thomas Mitchell, who played O'Hara in the movie. All the characters mentioned are played by people with sufficient physical resemblance to carry the whole thing off.

Unfortunately for Rhett Butler, aka Steven Kelley, someone decides to stick a knife in his chest. And there seem to be lots of people with a credible reason for doing something like that. Steven Kelley was a lech, and everyone knew it with the possible exception of his wife. Kelley was head of the drama department at a local college and artistic director for the plantation group. He had a tendency to give good grades to attractive female students and had hit on more than a few. He hit on Delilah's nieces, collectively, but they turned him down.

Generally Kelley was considered by a lot of people to be the scum of the earth.

Delilah finds an ally in Will Burke, a colleague of Kelley's. She finds herself confronting Timothy Farraday, who is the investigator from the sheriff's department, with alarming frequency. He is the obvious set-up to be her love interest. Doesn't work out that way, at least not in this book. Delilah is determined to find the murderer because she thinks that if s/he is not caught, her fledgling business will suffer a great deal. She keeps poking around, getting in Farraday's way.

FRANKLY MY DEAR, I'M DEAD will certainly appeal to those who have an inordinate fondness for GWTW. Readers who cherish the amateur female sleuth sticking her nose in where it has no business will also find much to enjoy. On the other hand, readers who have had enough of the "divorced woman starting over" and the "woman who puts up with too much crap in her life" mysteries will probably not want to spend much time with Delilah.

Reviewed by P.J. Coldren, January 2009

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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