Morgue Mama Mysteries

Most people think of the morgue as that cold and sterile facility where medical examiners do their necessary, albeit dreadful, work. Less familiar is the other type of morgue, the dry and dusty version, the newspaper morgue, usually housed in the basements and backrooms of newspaper buildings, where old news clippings are filed away. Dolly Madison Sprowls has been in charge of the Hannawa Herald-Union's morgue for more than forty years. She is gruff and salty, well past the age of retirement, and the unchallenged queen of her ink-stained domain. Reporters call her Morgue Mama but only behind her back. Maddy Sprowls' well-ordered world gets turned upside down when the paper hires twenty-four-year-old Aubrey McGinty for its police beat. Aubrey loses no time in questioning the conviction of Sissy James for the murder of televangelist Buddy Wing. It's true that Sissy had quickly confessed—live on television—to poisoning the famous preacher, and the evidence does seem overwhelming. But the ambitious young reporter doesn't believe Sissy is guilty. Aubrey enlists the help of Morgue Mama to dig into the morgue's files. Their search for the truth soon becomes harrowing—and dangerous—as they uncover enough suspects to fill a church with those who do the devil's work

Maddy Sprowls, newspaper librarian for the Hannawa Herald-Union, prefers to stay in the newspaper morgue and do her job. But one Saturday, she sees four elderly women get out of a taxicab at a garage sale. She figures that those women must hire that cabby every week to drive them from garage sale to garage sale, and wouldn't that make a great feature story for the paper? Shortly after the story runs, one of the four women, retired antiques dealer Violeta Bell, is murdered. Maddy wants no part of the investigation, but before she knows it, she's on another of her infamous snoopathons. Were they hunting for bargains-or for something else?