Blue Christmas Bones

This 28th installment in Haines’s Sarah Booth Delaney cozy mystery series (after Lights, Camera, Bones) gains an added layer of charm through narrator Kate Forbes’s spot-on Southern accents. The story continues Sarah’s Mississippi-based investigations alongside Tinkie, her best friend and stalwart partner in the Delaney Detective Agency. Together with their friends Millie and Cece, Sarah and Tinkie are enjoying their Christmas vacation, having traveled to Tupelo, MS, for the annual Elvis festival. However, soon after Sarah and Tinkie arrive, a replica of Elvis’s jewel-encrusted Las Vegas belt is stolen. Sarah and her friends take on the case, only to discover that the belt’s prickly owner, Grace Land, has created many suspects with her unpleasant personality. Combining the Christmas setting with Elvis, Haines creates a delightful holiday mystery. Longtime series narrator Forbes offers an engaging performance, capturing the book’s abundance of Southern charm with appropriate accents and changes in tone and pitch. Forbes depicts Sarah as somewhat older than the 30-some years she has in the novel, but series listeners will still respond to her dynamic portrayal.