Pre-Owned Death Tidies Up (Hardcover) 9781575668758

In Maid for Murder, Barbara Colley introduced the indomitable, utterly winsome sleuth Charlotte LaRue. "Death Tidies Up," her second and equally engaging whodunit finds the murder-solving maid back on the case, when a client of her successful New Orleans cleaning service, Maid-for-a-Day, becomes embroiled in long forgotten murder.

Between running Maid-for-a-Day and fretting about her upcoming birthday (the dreaded 6-0), Charlotte doesn't have much time for gossip. But New Orleans's latest dust-up is hard to ignore -- especially since it involves Marian Hebert, one of Charlotte's new clients. It turns out that Marian's now-deceased husband once worked for his best friend Drew Bergeron's real-estate agency -- and when the business deal soured, so did the friendship. The whole sordid affair came to an unfortunate end when Drew died in a plane crash -- and Bill Hebert was killed in what some call an accident -- and others call murder. Charlotte's happy to ignore the rumors -- until she finds a barely-cold corpse in the closet of a soon-to-be renovated old mansion she's cleaning.

The police are sure the body is Drew Bergeron, which strikes Charlotte as funny, considering he's supposedly been dead for years. Now, all that gossip about the Heberts and Bergerons seems incredibly -- and dangerously -- timely. As old rivalries flare and past secrets suddenly come back in the present, Charlotte figures she'd better sort things out fast -- before the situation gets too messy even for her. Contributor: Barbara Colley