Book description
Maddy Sprowls gets to The Hannawa Herald-Union on the stroke of nine.
She makes her first mug of Darjeeling tea and settles down at her desk
to read the obituaries. The obits are the best part of her day, she
admits. But not today. First she reads that her old college friend
Gordon Sweet is dead. Then she learns he was murdered-at the abandoned
landfill where the eccentric archaeology professor was conducting his
latest dig. And just like that, the cranky 68-year-old newspaper
librarian finds herself investigating an-other murder. No, two murders!
Gordon's death just might be linked to the grisly bludgeoning of state
wrestling champ David Delarosa fifty years earlier. And so begins a
harrowing and hilarious trek back to Maddy's old beatnik days, when she
was a member of the Meriwether Square Baked Bean Existentialist Society.
Legendary beat writer Jack Kerouac still casts a long shadow over the
group. And there's a coffee house full of quirky suspects to consider:
Poet Chick Glass, saxophonist Shaka Bop, free-thinking Effie
Fred-mansky, snooty Gwen Moffitt-Stumpf, and toxic waste dumper Kenneth
Kingzette, just to name a few. There's a reason why reporters call Maddy
“Morgue Mama” behind her back. And why cops and criminals alike get the
jitters when she pulls up in her old Dodge Shadow. She is tough,
tenacious, and as readers of C. R. Corwin's Morgue Mama: The Cross
Kisses Back discovered, tricky as the dickens. Maddy Sprowls,
otherwise known (but nev-er within hearing distance) as Morgue Mama,
gets a shock when she settles in at her desk at the Huirnawa
Herald-Union one Monday morning. She reads the obituary of an old
friend. Gordon Sweet, an archaeology profes-sor, was shot through the
head. Determined to find out who killed her friend, Maddy, the head
librarian at the Herald-Union, stumbles on evidence that Sweet's murder
might he connected to another murder that happened half a century ago.
The third Maddy Sprowls mystery is, like the previous two, solidly
plot-ted. But it's not the story that keeps us going; it's Maddy
herself, a charming, curmudgeonly 68-year-old who is less Miss Marple
and more television's Lou Grant (adjusted for age and gender
differences). If future Morgue Mama adventures are as fun as this one,
the series could be in for a long run. C. R. Corwin lives in Akron,
Ohio with his wife, Carol, and a pair of inexhaustible Shetland
sheepdogs, Nellie and Dudley. A former newspaperman, he teaches a
“Writing That Novel” course at the University of Akron.
