Title: Bacon, Bodyguards, and Ballistics
Author: Karen McSpade
Date: 2022
Publisher: Karen McSpade
Quote: "I couldn't help but feel a slight pang of pity toward them. Henry Hughes would rip them apart."
The speaker is Piper Sandstone, the sassy young police detective who's been sent from Chicago to the little fictional town of Savory for her own protection. The "them" are local boys, twins, who've been beaten up while failing to guard the valuable paintings Henry Hughes has displayed to the public. Hughes is a bad-tempered, rich art collector in the process of boosting the posthumous reputation of a local painter.
Piper and her local pals, formerly a band known as the Delta Queens and briefly self-identified as the Diamonds and Dentures detective club, have just been licensed as the Queen's Bees Private Eyes. They and Sheriff Jake, on whom Piper has a crush, are called on to find out who stole the paintings and beat up the young men. Meanwhile, Piper's past is catching up with her as a little harmless publicity, letting her face be seen on television, brings members of a gang she was almost able to bust, back in Chicago, out looking for her. When one of the failed security guards is found dead, Piper has to admit that she and her friends may be in real danger...from whom? From how many different directions? Are they solving two mysteries or one?
Back in Chicago, Piper's uncle has decided she needs a bodyguard. Piper resents the whole idea, and vents her resentment in nasty remarks about the guard's being short. The Delta Queens feel sorry for the guard, Gemma, and eventually goad her and Piper into a serious fight--not to the death, just rough enough to find out which tough gal is more dangerous.
It all ends as happily as cozy mysteries should, with the baddies all locked up, and along the way we get three or four relatively cheap, easy, redneck-chic recipes that fit in with the Southern Living atmosphere. At least they're cheap if fresh shrimp, strawberries, and pecans are plentiful. Each recipe will cause weight gain if not offset by significant exercise, and some of them are low in nutrition, but they're fun to serve in tiny portions at a party. Bacon is a theme. Recipes start with the bacon-wrapped shrimp on the cover and include bacon-enhanced chocolate chip cookies and bacon jam.
If you actually eat the bacon, you will enjoy the recipes. If you don't, you will at least enjoy what may or may not be a happy ending to Piper's and the Queens' detective careers.
This is a full-length detective novel but it's structured as five separate e-books, though not apparently marketed as such. Several plot elements that continued through the earlier books about Piper and the Queens are resolved in this book. Then again some others are left open. Will Gemma, who exudes drops of Italian melodrama when asked about her personal life, be paired off in a sequel? Will other gangsters come after Piper again? If Savory reverts to small-town-American form as the sort of place that doesn't see a murder in every decade, will Piper and friends be called to visit other towns when real crimes happen there, or will they continue to solve the kind of mysteries where petty property damage is done by straying pets and lost valuables turn up where someone whose memory is going left them? These questions may be answered in sequels but, for now, Piper's story seems to have reached a convenient rest area at the end of this book.
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