Brightleaf

Mary Beth Green leads a peaceful life running her boarding house and conducting amateur group therapy in her living room until she's compelled to steal a dog and lie to cover it up-- for "righteous" reasons. When one of her former boarders up and dies she worries that a murderer is living at the Rapturous Rest. Mary Beth gets busy solving the murder while fighting off the unwanted advances of a hypnotist and other gentlemen callers. Sometimes very good people do very bad things. The small tobacco town of Brightleaf, North Carolina seems to be a magnet for oddballs. Mary Beth Green, the towns boarding house owner, embraces them one and all and invites them to participate in the group therapy she runs on Wednesday nights. Not that she is right in head herself. When one of the townspeople mysteriously up and dies Mary Beth becomes a sleuth. A fun-lovin, character-driven novel that, like a big buttery bowl of popcorn, you wont want to put down until its all gone.