Adventures In Misfortune
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I don’t exactly dislike murder mysteries, or mystery stories in general…I’d just usually prefer to read something else. Occasionally, I will pick up what’s generally known as a “cozy mystery.” Wikipedia defines a cozy mystery as a story where the sex and violence occur “off-stage,” and the sleuth is an amateur, most often a woman, frequently one who’s just thrust into the situation rather than seeking it out. Often, the mysteries take place in small close-knit communities. I’ve rather enjoyed the Ground Rules Mystery series recently, penned by Emmeline Duncan. But I think that what I enjoy about this type of book (and this series in particular) is not the murder or the detecting but the characters and the environment. In Duncan’s series, I’m enjoying all the detailed information about coffee and also the fact that it is set in Portland, Oregon, a city I know well.
Then there is the sort of book described as a “mystery suspense novel” which includes series like Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series. Wikipedia describes Stephanie as a combination of Dirty Harry and Nancy Drew. Evanovich herself describes her protagonist as “incredibly average and yet heroic if necessary.” I think that’s a fair description. But these books are wildly funny, which is the main draw for me. However, now that Evanovich has published her 29th Stephanie Plum novel, along with some novellas and short stories, I’m sorry to have to report that her characters stay the same. They don’t grow or mature and it’s frankly getting tiresome. I still read the books, but now I check them out of the library…I don’t buy them anymore.
All of this brings me to the subject of today’s review: the Miss Fortune series by Jana DeLeon, classified variously as “cozy mystery” or “mystery suspense”.
Warning: mild spoilers ahead.
“On a hot and humid Saturday evening, I stepped off the bus in Sinful, Louisiana, and was fairly certain I’d gone straight to hell. Forrest Gump had gotten it all wrong. Life wasn’t a box of chocolates. It was a box of ex-lax, and I felt like I’d consumed the entire thing.” —Louisiana Longshot
DeLeon has just published her 24th book in the series, and I’m still loving them. I love them so much that I own both the ebook version and the audio version of each book. I’ll get to the audio books later, but for now, let’s talk about the stories themselves.
There are three main characters and multiple secondary characters that we come to know and love in the books. In the first novel Louisiana Longshot, we meet our protagonist Fortune Redding, a CIA assassin whose latest mission goes badly awry. She finds herself on the run from a vengeful and extremely dangerous arms dealer, and is forced to hide until he can be apprehended. Her boss sends her to impersonate his niece in a small Louisiana town called Sinful. Yep, Sinful, Louisiana. It’s such an American town name…Once she arrives, she takes up residence in the niece’s newly inherited house along the bayou and almost immediately trips over human remains. In the same day, she is introduced to the two elderly ladies who become her sidekicks (or maybe she is their sidekick? it’s hard to say in the early books): Gertie and Ida Belle. These characters appear to be normal southern ladies on the surface, but Fortune quickly realizes that much more is going on than is obvious. For one thing, Gertie and Ida Belle run the Sinful Ladies Society, a group of peers who know most of everything that is going on in the town and surrounding area, have their fingers in much of it, and also make moonshine that they market as “Sinful Ladies Cough Syrup.” Fortune also discovers at the end of the first book that Gertie and Ida Belle both fought in the Vietnam War, and are therefore much closer to Fortune’s perspective on life and death and combat than most other residents of Sinful. The balanced friendship between these two elderly ladies, enduring for decades, is a beautiful thing to behold.
“I was right in the middle of a dream where I was Lara Croft, but not as girlie, when my cell phone rang. I sprang out of bed, grabbed my nine, and hit the floor in a firing stance, facing the bedroom door. Then I remembered I was hiding out in Sinful, Louisiana, and not on a CIA mission in the Middle East. I lay my nine back on the nightstand and reached for my cell phone.” —Lethal Bayou Beauty
Fortune, Gertie, and Ida Belle naturally solve the mystery of who actually killed the man whose bones Fortune found, and are warned repeatedly by the local deputy Carter to “stay out of police business.” Of course, that doesn’t happen…Swamp Team Three, as they come to call themselves, makes a point of messing about in police business at almost every opportunity in all the books. This leads to many run-ins with Carter, which are frequently laugh-out-loud funny. Along the way, we also meet some other characters who are just as delightful as our main trio, each in their own way.
As I was writing this blog post, I conferred with one of my bibliophile friends, the lady who introduced me to this series in the first place. I was talking to her about the difficulty of pulling humorous quotes out of these books, because the humor tends to build and expand over multiple pages, rather than being a one-liner sort of joke. To make my point, I read aloud to her my favorite (funniest) section out of all the books, chapters 11 and 12 of Lethal Bayou Beauty, where Fortune, Ida Belle, and Gertie stage an ill-advised raid on the police station in a quest for information that Deputy Carter refuses to share. As I was reading the multiple pages of this particular incident, my friend and I were almost in tears from laughing so much. What a great recommendation for a book!
These books are so darn entertaining that I have read each of them multiple times, and also listened to the audio versions multiple times. Cassandra Campbell is the narrator for the series, and she gets the voices for each character exactly right. And she manages the pacing in such a way as to maximize the humor. She really does a beautiful job and I highly recommend the audio books…I got all of mine off of iTunes.
Want a quick and very entertaining read? Try this series…
