Mama Stalks the Past
by Nora Deloach

Mama’s passion is digging up bits and pieces until she’s solved a mystery. Long ago she decided that if we could get at the truth of a problem, we would have made a contribution to humankind. Most of the time I agree with Mama. This time, however, finding the truth about Hannah Mixon’s murder could cost Mama her life….

Mama’s name is Grace, but folks call her Candi because of a golden-brown complexion that puts you in mind of candied sweet potatoes. Mama makes her living as a case manager for Social Services, but her talent for cooking up the best food in Otis, South Carolina, is well known. When things weren’t working out for me in Atlanta, Mama suggested I come home. I soon knew I’d made the right decision when I found Nat Mixon on Mama’s doorstep threatening to tell the whole town that Mama stole his inheritance. It seems that Nat’s mother and Mama’s neighbor, spiteful recluse Hannah Mixon, had just died and left a will naming Mama as her beneficiary—yet Mama had never spoken to the woman!

Everybody in Otis knew Nat was one can short of a six-pack, but he was built like a tank and threatening Mama’s reputation, which to Mama is as bad as threatening her life.

When it turned out the bequest was 250 acres of land, and Miss Hannah had died of poisoning, a big drama was under way in a small town where inherited property is more valuable than gold.

Mama couldn’t see her reputation ruined—she had to discover why Hannah had left her the property and why the old woman had been murdered. And maybe that was exactly what Hannah Mixon expected her to do—why else had she left Mama a message to look for a missing envelope? But before Mama can find the hidden clue, Nat Mixon himself is brutally attacked. Mama’s "sleuthing intuition" gets to working and, with the kindly assistance of three Otis women who should be on the FBI payroll for their expertise in uncovering other people’s business, my ninety-nine-year-old great-uncle Chester’s grasp of family history, and me as her escort, Mama prows that blood flowed freely on Hannah Mixon’s land. Land that somebody was willing to kill for…more than once. And unless Mama can uncover a secret buried for decades beneath greed and family betrayal—and now murder—she may never sleuth again….

In Mama Stalks the Past, Nora DeLoach offers up a suspenseful tale of how family ties snap like thread when a large inheritance attracts a brutal killer….And she spins a tale featuring one of the most endearing and memorable sleuths in fiction today.