Dig

by C R Corwin

Overview

Maddy Sprowls gets to The Hannawa Herald-Union right at nine. She makes her first mug of Darjeeling tea and settles down at her desk to read the obituaries. The obits are the best part of her day, she admits. But not today. First she reads that her old college friend Gordon Sweet is dead. Then she learns he was murderedat the abandoned landfill where the eccentric archaeology professor was conducting his latest dig.
And just like that, the cranky 68-year-old newspaper librarian finds herself investigating another murder. No, two murders! Gordon's death just might be linked to the grisly bludgeoning of state wrestling champ David Delarosa fifty years earlier.
And so begins a harrowing, and hilarious, trek back to Maddy's old beatnik days, when she was a member of the Meriwether Square Baked Bean Existentialist Society. There's a coffee house full of quirky suspects to consider: Poet Chick Glass, saxophonist Shaka Bop, free-thinking Effie Fredmansky, snooty Gwen Moffitt-Stumpf, and toxic waste dumper Kenneth Kingzette, just to name a few. And, oh yes, the legendary beat writer Jack Kerouac figures into this satisfying caper, too.
There's a reason why reporters call Maddy ""Morgue Mama"" behind her back. And why cops and criminals alike get the jitters when she pulls up in her old Dodge Shadow. She is tough, tenacious, and as readers of C.R. Corwin's Morgue Mama: The Cross Kisses Back discovered, tricky as the dickens.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590582046
Publisher:	Poisoned Pen Press
Publication date:	11/28/2005
Series:	Morgue Mama Series
Edition description:	Large Print
Pages:	310
Product dimensions:	5.88(w) x 8.38(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

C.R. Corwin is a former newspaper reporter living in Akron, Ohio. He teaches a Writing That Novel workshop through the University of Akron.

Table of Contents

Editorial Reviews

So Morgue Mama was a beatnik. Who knew? In Dig, the second entry in C.R. Corwin's Morgue Mama' mystery series, Dolly Madison Sprowls -- Maddy' to her friends -- again sticks her 68-year-old nose where it doesn't belong. It belongs in the Hannawa Herald-Union's reference library, the department that some newspaper folks still affectionately call the morgue. It doesn't belong poking into the murder of Maddy's old college buddy Gordon Sweet, an archaeology professor whose body was found at the site of his dig. Back in the day, when Maddy and her Hannawa College friends founded the Meriweather Square Baked Bean Existentialist Society, Jack Kerouac's visit was more important than anything, you dig? But there was a murder back then, too, a murder that went unsolved, and Maddy thinks that just maybe the two are related. In The Cross Kisses Back, the first in the series, Maddy helped solve the murder of a televangelist. Here, she's not only out to learn who shot Sweet Gordon, ' but also who bludgeoned David Delarosa in 1957, and where some toxic chemicals were dumped, and whether Kerouac's last meal in Hannawa was a hamburger or a cheeseburger (it's really important). The Cross Kisses Back was notable for its obvious references to Akron landmarks in its Hannawa' setting. Dig's allusions are less pointed, although Maddy does drive by the Trawsfyndd Castle' Tudor mansion. The annual Grand Kerouacian Anniversary Ball, held to commemorate the poet's visit, provides no shortage of suspects. C.R. Corwin is a pseudonym for Akron author Rob Levandoski, author of Fresh Eggs and Serendipity Green. -- Barbara McIntyre, Akron Beacon Journal (1/15/2006)

From the Publisher

When Gordon E. (Sweet Gordon) Sweet, a professor of "garbology," is found shot to death at an archaeological dig in the town landfill, Maddy's thoughts leap back to the 1950's, when he and she were campus beatniks, charter members of the Meriwether Square Baked Bean Existentialist Society. "We listened to jazz, drank little cups of coffee and talked and talked and talked," she explains to the young librarian who gives her a hand on this case, which is both a brainteaser and a comic salute to the rather terrifying charm of its heroine.
— The New York Times

Marilyn Stasio

When an old college friend is murdered, shot in the head at a landfill, 68-year-old librarian Maddy Sprowls is willing to work overtime to help the police discover the culprit in Corwin's winning second cozy to feature the head of the Hannawa (Ohio) Herald-Union's "morgue" (after 2003's Morgue Mama: The Cross Kisses Back). Digging in the newspaper's files, Maddy uncovers a decades-old unsolved murder that took place during her student days and wonders if the two crimes could be connected. A game old bird battling loneliness and the prospect of retirement, she has a tendency to digress about local landmarks and such trivia as how to make her favorite sandwich. But once Maddy starts to put the pieces of the puzzle together, the plot picks up and builds to an exciting and fitting conclusion. Agent, Martin Shepard. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

The investigation of a former Beatnik's murder becomes a bittersweet trip down memory lane. Newspaper librarian Maddy Sprowls is saddened by the death of her old friend Gordon Sweet, an archaeology professor, and disturbed to see that Sweet Gordon, as she called him, was murdered. In the 1950s, Maddy and Gordon and a handful of others rubbed elbows with Kerouac and Ginsberg and called themselves the Meriwether Square Baked Bean Existentialist Society. For the second time (Morgue Mama, 2003), curious Maddy can't resist turning amateur sleuth, though strictly on the QT, since Bob Averill, editor-in-chief of The Hannawa Herald-Union, is looking for any excuse to give Maddy, a maverick with a lot of seniority, the boot. A handful of likely suspects emerge, each pulling the probe in a different direction. Sweet, whose corpse was discovered at a local landfill, may have been gathering evidence against notorious polluter Kenneth Kingzette. Sweet's skeevy nephew Mickey Gitlin is a penny-ante drug dealer desperate for money, and his graduate assistant, Andrew Holloway, is notoriously unstable. But Maddy keeps being drawn back to the unsolved murder of Sweet's close friend David Delarosa 50 years before. Her suspicions uncover several dark secrets better left alone and thorny questions about Sweet's sexuality. Sublimely snappy prose keeps this otherwise ordinary mystery afloat. Maddy, full of life at 68, is a terrific narrator.

Kirkus Reviews