Irish Chain: 2 (Benni Harper Mystery)

Author: Fowler, Earlene

Brand: Penguin Random House

Color: Multicolor

Edition: Reprint

Binding: Mass Market Paperback

Format: Deckle Edge

Number Of Pages: 320

Release Date: 01-02-1996

Part Number: 9780425151372

Details: Product Description


Meet Benni Harper...a spirited ex-cowgirl, quilter, and folk-art expert who's staking out her own corner of the contemporary American West. She's got an eye for murderous designs--and a talent for piecing together the most complex and cold-blooded crimes.

Benni's taking time from her job at the folk-art museum to sponsor a "senior prom" at San Celina's retirement home. During the dance, she's surprised to find herself waltzing with Clay O'Hara, the Colorado cowboy she had a crush on when she was seventeen. She's even more surprised when Clay's uncle and an elderly woman are found dead in one of the residents' rooms. Now Benni's trying to find a link between the two victims--and the common thread that bound them together in death...


About the Author


Earlene Fowler was raised in La Puente, California, by a Southern mother and a Western father. She lives in Southern California with her husband, Allen, a large number of quilts, and twenty pairs of cowboy boots.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.


I'm going to snatch you baldheaded, Benni Harper, if you don't haul your butt over here right now,'' Gramma Dove said, her voice as raspy as the old Hank Williams records she loves. All the orphan calves on the Ramsey Ranch had been milk-fed and soothed to sleep by her gritty-voiced renditions of ``I Saw The Light,'' and ``I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry.'' For that matter, so had I.
``I was just walking out the door,'' I lied amicably, sitting behind the counter of the small gift shop in the empty folk art museum. An earsplitting click answered me when she hung up the phone. She hadn't called me ``young lady'' yet. That meant I still had time. My stomach rumbled, reminding me I'd forgotten to eat breakfast again. I knew Dove though, and she never came down from the ranch without bringing something to eat, determined to bring me back up to what she called ``fighting hen weight.'' I'd lost ten pounds when my husband, Jack, was killed a year ago when his Jeep flipped over on a lonely stretch of old Highway One, and I'd never regained it. Dove worries about that as she does every minuscule detail of my life. A born ``heel snapper,'' she is a determined cattle dog of a woman and, according to her, I remain her most unmanageable calf. Her constant interference in my life is a good-natured but continual bone of contention between us. Hope and anticipation for her heart-melting sweet potato biscuits caused my stomach to growl again.
Ignoring my hunger, I turned back to the oak-framed cross-stitch sampler I was logging into the inventory book. ``The Best Things Come But Once in a Lifetime.''
Stitched in a dashing sweep of blues ranging from robin's egg to deep, lustrous navy, each letter was outlined in black, causing the sentiment to almost jump out at me. It was one of the over two hundred samplers we'd received at the museum in response to our newspaper ad requesting cross-stitched and embroidered samplers for our newest exhibit. As curator of the Josiah Sinclair Folk Art Museum, I was responsible for choosing the hundred or so we actually had room to display. To be fair, I had tried to select a wide variety of styles, ages and degrees of craftsmanship but especially ones with heart, ones that appeared to mean something special to each artist when they created it. What I had in mind was for the exhibit to tell its own story, about the individual artists, about our town and about the wider community of man. The success of the show was important to me. Though proud of my last exhibit of antique quilts and of the five newspaper articles written about the museum, I couldn't overlook the fact that the publicity had more to do with the murders that took place on the premises rather than my expertise as a curator. A reporter for the travel section of the L.A. Times had contacted me two weeks ago wanting to do a small piece on our new museum and she didn't even mention the murders. That made it essent

EAN: 9780425151372

Package Dimensions: 6.6 x 4.2 x 0.9 inches

Languages: English