Ms. Dee Ann Meets Murder

By Patsy Hinton Pridgen

Description:

Married for just sixteen months, since December 14, 1977, Dee Ann Bulluck is unhappy with her husband Joe about moving to 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.

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, she decides she has a chance of discovering the identity of the killer by simply reading about the murder in the local paper and listening to any gossip Joe brings home from the bank. After all, there’s only so much investigating a stay-at-home mama can do.

But Dee Ann soon ventures out in Narrow Creek, getting an earful about the murdered man along with a curly perm at the Kut and Kurl. She overhears two of the victim’s former girlfriends accuse each other 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 technical college.

As Dee Ann searches for the killer’s identity, she finds her niche in Narrow Creek. 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 leisure suits, funeral food, Sunday church…and a feisty amateur sleuth.

Book Takeaway:

The protagonist is torn between being a full-time mother to her infant daughter and having a career. She finds a compromise, along with discovering a killer in her new hometown.

Why the author wrote this book:

Apart from the fun of writing a gentle mystery, I wanted to record the life of a young wife and mother in a small Southern town in the late 1970's. My hope is that many baby boomer women can identify with the struggles of the protagonist while younger readers will gain an understanding of the earlier times of their mothers and grandmothers.