Available at https://www.amazon.com/Ms-Meets-Murder-Narrow-Creek/dp/1642376892/ref=sr_1_1
Married for just sixteen months—since December 14, 1977—Dee Ann Bulluck is unhappy with her husband Joe about moving to small, isolated Narrow Creek, North Carolina, for his job as the “new man” at the bank. She has a baby girl, no family close by, and no job herself. Young-people poor, Joe and Dee Ann live in a backyard apartment, a situation that allows Miss Josie, their landlady, to offer both unwanted surveillance and advice.
Dee Ann feels doomed to a life of genteel poverty and boredom—until the murder of the town’s two-timing, drug-dealing playboy. Tempted by the $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the case, Dee Ann decides she has a chance of discovering the identity of the killer by simply reading about the murder in the Narrow Creek News and Views and listening to what the locals have to say about the case. After all, there’s only so much investigating a stay-at-home mama can do.
But Dee Ann eventually ventures out in Narrow Creek, getting an earful about the victim along with a perm at the Kut and Kurl. She overhears two prime suspects accusing each other of the murder at the Narrow Creek Ladies’ Society Arts and Crafts Bazaar and meets another person of interest, the victim’s jealous uncle, when she goes for a job interview at the local community college.
As Dee Ann searches for the killer’s identity, she finds her niche in Narrow Creek, becoming friends with the proper, faithful Elizabeth Tucker and the beautiful, flirtatious Scarlett Hood. She learns her new hometown, respectable on the surface, has an underbelly of cheating women and sexist men.
Ms. Dee Ann Meets Murder depicts small-town Southern life in the late 1970s, with funeral food, Sunday church, leisure suits… and a feisty amateur sleuth.
Patsy Pridgen 