New Book Review: Uprooting Ernie

Title: Uprooting Ernie 

Author:  Pamela Burford

Date: 2015

Publisher: Radical Poodle Press

ISBN: 978-1939215857

Quote: "Chip Wentworth...had paid me a hundred bucks to upend a three-liter spigot box of white Zinfandel on his mother Dorothy's grave."

It's a whole series of ridicule of the things rich people do after burying their dead. In this series, Jane Delaney has made a business of performing bizarre memorial tributes in cemeteries. Sometimes she persuades the bereaved to do more sensible things; in this book, she persuades a client to (pay her even more to help) donate his mother's deceased giant turtle to a museum rather than sawing it up and dumping it into the coffin on top of Ma's remains. 

Because she honestly does pour out the wine on the grave, rather than pocket he money and drink the wine, Jane happens to see a tree blow down in a gust of wind. Someone was buried under the tree without a gravestone or, for that matter, a coffin. Jane suspects foul play, and begins investigating.

The skeleton who was uprooted by the storm was called Ernie, or Ernest. He died before Jane's time, but recently enough that several older people remember his story. Wasn't he drowned and lost at sea? Wasn't his drowning the result of some idiotic dare bet where he was pushed out of a boat by friends who watched to see him swim back to land? Something was funny about the official story. Was Ernie murdered? Who was Ernie, and who were his friends? Could one of them have made a false confession to protect another one? Will Ernie's story turn out to be a touching tale of small-town yung people's friendship, or of hate-fuelled murder? 

This is such a comic cozy mystery that I didn't even try to guess. I just read along for the ridiculous characters and situations. Would I have guessed the final answer to all the unanswered questions about Ernie's last day if I'd been trying? Probably not. It's funny, and it's fairly cozy, but it's still a mystery. 

For people who like comic cozy mysteries, Pamela Burford would be well worth printing in hardcover. You'll like Ernie and his friends; you'll like Jane and hers; you'll like the preposterous jobs they do and things they ea. and things their pets do, and you'll probably even like her snarky, affectionate view of upstate New York.