The Good Girl's Guide to Murder
A Debutante Dropout Mystery

By Susan McBride

    I'll start this review by objecting to the book jacket designer's description of web designer Andy Kendricks' latest case, Marilee Mabry, as "a home guru who makes Martha Stewart look as honest as Abe Lincoln and as sweet as candy."

   The hardscrabble rags-to-riches Mrs. Mabry certainly doesn't win any J.K. Rowling prizes for single mom success story, especially since she's stealing daughter Kendall's scummy boyfriend Justin Gable and calling her TV show "The Sweet Life" her "baby" in front of a live audience. However, Marilee, to borrow a phrase from Andy, is nothing if not quotable: "She was on top of the world and suddenly understood how Martha Stewart must have felt when she rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, the day her corporation went public (before her trumped-up trial and conviction over a silly stock sale)."

    To paint Martha Stewart as a harridan is to paint Andy's meddling high-society mother Cissy Blevins Kendricks, as your typical rhymes-with-witch-and-rich. Luckily Andy's smarter than that, even when she wants to kill Cissy for meddling in her love life with adorable lawyer Brian Malone and floating theories about ephedra-dealing Justin committing murder a la Scott Peterson (seems Kendall and Marilee both have a heart problem). But as Andy says, "Despite our bipolar existence, I did love my mother, and she loved me. I'd never doubted that for a minute." Particularly since, unlike Marilee's TV show, Andy is most decidedly Cissy Kendrick's "baby." Classy Cissy, who befriends an African-American family moving into the formerly all-white Beverly Drive neighborhood, is more likely than Marilee to resemble Martha, who jokes about prison food and raves about the friends she's made.

   Once again, Andy finds that blood is thicker than sparkling water as she and Cissy team up to solve the puzzler surrounding Marilee, Kendall and Justin after Kendall's found comatose in Marilee's house during evacuation from a fire started by Marilee's ex-husband's trophy wife's hairpiece. Amid the hijinks, McBride, as in Andy's debut Blue Blood, focuses on a bittersweet exploration the mother-daughter bond. Like Martha's daughter Alexis, Andy Kendricks stands by her mom.

Reviews of other titles in this series

Blue Blood #1 [review 1] [review 2]
The Good Girl's Guide to Murder #2
The Lone Star Lonely Hearts Club #3
Night of the Living Deb #4
Too Pretty to Die #5
Say Yes to the Death #6