Desert Dead

Ivy and Mac are on the road, headed for their long-delayed honeymoon. Baja! Beaches! Romance and shrimp tacos and sunshine! But then comes a panicky phone call from good friend Magnolia, who is, as usual, looking into her complicated family genealogy. What she’s found this time is not another fourth-cousin-three-times-removed, but a dead body in the middle of a desert town. Except that this body, unlike the dead bodies with which Ivy has had past experience, has vanished. Magnolia is uncertain if she made a foolish mistake about there ever being a body, or if something sinister is going on. Sinister as in murder. Mac and Ivy figure a brief side trip to Prosperity, Arizona, to help their old friend won’t take long, but when they arrive they find complications. In addition to the missing body, there’s an old cowboy trying to revive a faded western-movie career, a possible blackmailing, and a two-million-dollar insurance policy. Also an ex-model writing the Great American Novel, her artist boyfriend, gloomy about his surprising success as a painter of desert roadrunners, and a hungry roadrunner named Harry. And somewhere in the desert scene, there’s also a killer, now determined to put Ivy and Mac into the category of the missing dead.