Anne George •
Murder on a Girls’ Night Out •

In Anne George’s Southern Sisters mystery series, sisterhood is not just powerful, but howlingly funny. You’ve got to love an author who can come up with lines like “You called Fred to tell him Jed said Ed was dead?”

Narrator Patricia Anne (“Mouse”), a former English teacher, would be happy to spend her retirement years enjoying her grandnieces and looking after her husband, the aforementioned Fred. “He was lying there snoring lightly, twitching occasionally just like Woofer does when he dreams he’s chasing rabbits. I wondered who Fred was chasing.”

But flamboyant, thrice-widowed Mary Alice (“Sister”) has just made an impulse buy: a country-western dance bar called the Skoot ’n’ Boot. Almost before the ink is dry on the sale papers, the previous owner is found hanging in the bar’s wishing well, his throat slit from side to side.

The subsequent police inquiry is nearly derailed by recriminations over who went through whose bureau drawers in search of a borrowed Gucci scarf. Mary Alice “wondered why I was mad at her since I left the key out there in that plastic rock, anyway, for anyone to come in my house, and she had seen an advertisement for a dog turd that you hid a key in that would be a lot better than that old rock, a fake dog turd, of course, and she would order me one, and why wouldn’t I talk to her, that she hadn’t done anything but look in my dresser.”

George embellishes her story with political asides, cooking tips, literary throwback Bonnie Blue Butler, and a band named the Swamp Creatures. Fly McCorkle, an aging hippie hired to renovate the Boot, advises the sisters to recite their mantras while waiting for the sheriff to arrive.

Now I’m dying to know what those mantras are.