A Mystery Bred in Buckhead

Sheila Travis #6

by Patricia Sprinkle

A MYSTERY BRED IN BUCKHEAD - A Southern Mystery Southern Hospitality and Cold-Blooded Murder In genteel Atlanta society there are worse crimes than murder-such as missing Rippen Delacourt's annual Christmas party, a fifty-year tradition. As amateur sleuth Sheila Travis joins her family and cherished friends at Rip's gala, she never suspects that before the end of the evening, a long-missing, priceless manuscript will turn up in the hands of a disgruntled servant . . . and release enough closeted skeletons to fill Rip's guest list. Someone doesn't want the unpublished novel to come to light-and is willing to make sure it doesn't. As Sheila stubbornly pursues the manuscript, she makes a deadly discovery: the someone who has already killed to keep the papers out of her hands is probably a relative or a lifelong friend . . . who now is drawing a bead on Sheila. Sixth in the series. Reprint edition.

Genres: Mystery, Cozy Mystery, Mystery Thriller

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 30, 1994

About the author

Aka Patricia Houck Sprinkle.

When I met and married Bob, he looked over our budget and demanded, "Why don’t you write a mystery to pay for all the ones you buy?" I immediately knew I wanted to put a body in a building where I’d once worked. However, being over-endowed with the Protestant ethic, I wrote "important" things first and only wrote the mystery in my spare time, so my first mystery, Murder at Markham (reissued by Silver Dagger in 2001), took thirteen years to complete. It took even longer for me to learn that any writing which gives me pleasure is important, whether fiction or non-fiction.

Since 1988 I have written twenty mysteries, four novels, and five non-fiction books. I am grateful to my readers and editors for letting me do what I enjoy most in the world. Bob has concluded that writing is not a profession, it's an obsession--my favorite vacation is to go to a place where somebody else fixes my meals and where I can write more than I do at home, without interruptions. Thanks, if you are one of the readers who keeps my fingers on the keys. I enjoy spending time with you at conferences, book clubs, and signing events.

Reviews

[Dharia Scarab]

Since I don't normally write reviews unless I have something specific to say, here's the break down of how I rate my books...

1 star... This book was bad, so bad I may have given up and skipped to the end. I will avoid this author like the plague in the future.

2 stars... This book was not very good, and I won't be reading any more from the author.

3 stars... This book was ok, but I won't go out of my way to read more, But if I find another book by the author for under a dollar I'd pick it up.

4 stars... I really enjoyed this book and will definitely be on the look out to pick up more from the series/author.

5 stars... I loved this book! It had earned a permanent home in my collection and I'll be picking up the rest of the series and other books from the author ASAP.

[Nd]

This mystery kept you hopping keeping up with characters, murders, and family and old-friend situations. I think it was a bit helpful that I hadn't realized that Sheila Travis was the sleuth protagonist, so her emergence as the one fairly logical character was a thread to grasp. This was a tale of a group of aging/aged Buckhead elites who lived through or served in World War II. Some employed more than one generation on staff and took children into their families to raise when necessary. The plot revolves around envelopes stolen many years past by a disgruntled employee from the desk of now-deceased Peggy Marsh/Margaret Mitchell, famous for Gone with the Wind. When everyone in the bunch suddenly seemed covertly hell-bent on getting these envelopes that supposedly held chapters of a never published book, people kept getting harmed or killed before the chapters could be had.

[Susan]

Sheila Travis has returned to the upper-class Atlanta society where she grew up, but a series of incidents culminating in murder forces her to look to her honorary uncles and aunts with new eyes, to the displeasure of the real aunt, Mary, who helped raise her. But deaths and attacks that are related to a manuscript stolen fifty years earlier from a famous author make her wonder what, exactly, the author revealed in the unpublished book.

[Marsha Valance]

Amateur sleuth Sheila Travis returns, caught in another witty and perplexing tale of murder, Southern style. A long-missing and priceless manuscript turns up and threatens to dislodge a number of genteel Atlanta's closeted skeletons. Soon a society ball's guest list turns into a list of suspects in a twisty tale of murder.

[Charlotte]

One of my favorites in this series. (Other favorites are: "Murder in the Charleston Manner" and "Deadly Secrets on the St. Johns") The author is pretty skilled at characterizations (although I occasionally forget who is who and how they fit into the plot, this happens to me in real life too, LOL, and I think it's just me) and her characters are so interesting, so real that you feel like you know them, even the ones who aren't so likeable! There's a couple characters in this book that made my skin crawl! This book is made all that more interesting as the characters involved in the mystery are all lifelong friends of the heroine Sheila Travis's Aunt Mary. And Aunt Mary, usually so eager for her niece to get involved in solving the crime, in this book seems to be doing everything possible to keep Sheila in the dark, to prevent her from getting to the bottom of the mystery. To make this mystery even more interesting the author has interwoven the modern day mystery to one going back to a time when Aunt Mary and her compatriots are young and just starting out. And as usual, the author interweaves history and a "travelogue" of the area into the plot.

[Teri]

I rescued this book from my local library's throw-away pile.

This was another quick, easy read. I liked it better than the previous book in the series, but I guessed the culprit(s)before the end of the book.

A pet peeve smacked me in the face on page 205. Writers,
DO NOT address your readers in the middle of a story; it jerks us out of the imaginary world we're trying to get in to! Ugh.

I might read more from this series in the future.

[Kathy]

Another southern mystery for Shelia Travis. This one involves a manuscript that appears and then disappears. it's supposedly the work of Margaret Mitchell and is based on happenings of elderly friends of Sheila's Aunt Mary.
It keeps you rapidly turning the pages

[Jan]

This was a pretty good read...like the local flavor.