Alabama joins Mississippi as fertile Deep South soil for the Noir Series.

Southern gal Sarah Booth Delaney packs up her hound dog and her P.I. business and sets off for Hollywood to take a shot at stardom. No stranger to acting, she aces the screen test for a racy remake of the movie Body Heat alongside leading man Graf Miliau. The chemistry between them is undeniable, and why not? Graf has already starred in one of Sarah's previous affairs and is well on his way to landing a big part in the sequel. Thrilled as Sarah is, her dream come true comes at a price. She has to leave behind her family's ancestral home in Mississippi, her closest friends, and the possibility of settling down with her longtime love to film on location in Costa Rica. And it's not long before...

The twelfth in Carolyn Haines’ charming series finds Sarah Booth Delaney on the trail of a porn-star-turned-psychic operating from a haunted estate on the edge of town. Marjorie Littlefield, an eccentric billionaire, has always planned to leave her fortune to her cat. But when “medium” Sherry Cameron promises to reunite Marjorie with her dead child, Sarah Booth is convinced it’s a scheme to separate a lonely woman from her fortune. So, Sarah Booth talks her way onto the March estate as a maid, where she finds Marjorie and several other wealthy eccentrics ready to commune with the dead. Between chores, she explores the estate, finds a few corpses, and runs into a few ghosts along the...

When PI Sarah Booth Delaney and her partner and best friend, Tinkie, take on Monica and Eleanor Levert as clients, they don’t have much hope of solving the case. The wealthy heiresses of Briarcliff in Natchez, Mississippi, claim that a family necklace worth four million dollars has been stolen, and they think that they can hurry the insurance payout if a reputable PI investigates. Sarah Booth has her doubts, and not just about the payout. All of the evidence suggests that the sisters might be committing fraud. But when they have just started scratching the surface on the sordid past of the Levert family and the blood money that all of their wealth was founded upon, Monica goes missing....

For many years Jitty, Dahlia House’s resident ghost, has dreamed that Sarah Booth Delaney would have a child to inherit the family’s ancestral home. Sarah Booth has always had reservations about being a parent. There was her work as an actress and PI, taking care of the house, not to mention finding the right man. But when Jitty’s dream finally looks like it’s going to come true, Sarah Booth is crushed when it doesn’t. Depressed, unable to act or investigate, Sarah Booth finally allows her best friend to whisk her away for a luxurious weekend vacation at a special spa and cooking school. The pampering and food go a long way toward making her feel like her old self, but there’s another...

Sarah is no stranger to drama. So when this talented actress and a P.I. hears that her best friend’s husband is suddenly on his deathbed back home, she snaps into “action!” and gets right on the case…

It’s time for Sarah Booth to pack up her hound dog and her P.I. business and take a shot at stardom! Soon she aces the screen test for a racy remake of the movie Body Heat alongside leading man Graf Milieu. The chemistry between them is undeniable—and why not? Graf has already starred in one of Sarah’s previous affairs…and is well on his way to landing a big part in the sequel. Thrilled as Sarah is to be in Hollywood, her dream-come-true comes at a price. She has to leave behind her family’s ancestral home in Mississippi, her closest friends, and the possibility of settling down with her longtime love to film on location in Costa Rica. It’s not long before rivalries flare, unexplained...

Zinnia is abuzz: displaced from its New Orleans venue, a red-hot touring production of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is opening right in the heart of town, featuring hunky star Graf Milieu! While most folks are excited, Sarah Booth, who had her own brief stint on the Great White Way- and on the arm of Milieu himself- is less than thrilled. Graf is now linked with his costar, Renata Trovaioli, a dyed-in-the-wool diva who plans to ride Graf's coattails all the way to Hollywood. But Renata's trip to the top comes to a screeching halt on the play's second night, when someone laces her lipstick with cyanide. The plot thickens when Renata's brother arrives on the scene and makes it clear exactly who...

Dahlia House is haunted. No big revelation for those who know me and my family, but on this cold November morning as I sit and watch the sun gild the harvested cotton fields with a false show of silver I am acutely aware of the specters of the past. I suppose in one way or another, we are all haunted, though some of us more than others. In my haste to get to a pre-dawn murder scene, I accidentally picked up my mother’s car coat from the hook by the back door. Standing over the body of a dead twenty-three-year old woman, I inhaled my mother’s scent from the folds of her coat. I heard the words she told me when I was ten, grieving the death of a pet...

The leaves of the calendar may be shedding faster than the sycamores on her family's decaying Mississippi plantation, but thirty-something Sarah Booth Delaney isn't ready to sing the blues. Not when she's got a thriving detective agency and the outspoken, outrageously attired ghost of her great-great grandmother's nanny to keep her on her toes. But the matchmaking phantom may have the last word on motherhood when Sarah Booth takes on the controversial case of an accused baby killer. Although Doreen Mallory's been arrested for feeding sleeping pills to her ten-week-old daughter, no one could accuse her of lacking faith. A healer who, tragically, couldn't save her own baby girl, born with...