State fair

Folk art museum curator, rancher, and sometime sleuth Benni Harper returns with a long-awaited new mystery that has her attending the San Celina Mid-State Fair. It's the perfect place to go for caramel apples, 4-H calves, exquisite quilts, homemade jams - and murder!

Author Notes

Earlene Fowler was raised in La Puente, California. She wrote literary and commercial short fiction for ten years without publishing success when she decided to write a mystery novel. Her first novel, Fool's Puzzle, was published in 1994. Her other works include Kansas Troubles, Seven Sisters, Arkansas Traveler, Broken Dishes, Delectable Mountains, and The Saddlemaker's Wife. She won the Agatha Award for Mariner's Compass in 1999.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (1)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Set in 1997, Fowler's folksy 14th Benni Harper mystery (after 2007's Tumbling Blocks) finds the avid quilter, museum curator, and reluctant sleuth readying herself for the annual San Celina (Calif.) County Mid-State Fair. Racial tensions revolving around the fair's first black general manager, Levi Clark; Levi's half-white daughter, Jazz; and Jazz's various suitors stir the plot. So, too, does the visit from Arkansas of Benni's great-aunt, Garnet Wilcox. Garnet and her sister, Dove, Benni's grandmother, get along "like two bobcats trapped in a burning outhouse." A valued African-American quilt stolen from a fair exhibit and a corpse in another exhibit add fuel to the fire. Fowler's congenial mix of humor (prickly, surprising Garnet applies lessons learned from mystery books and cop shows), folklore (the history of black cloth dolls), and murder makes this Agatha Award-winning series as much fun to visit as a county fair and a likely ribbon winner. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Reviews (1)

Publisher's Weekly Review