Dig: (2 A Morgue Mama Mystery)

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.

Review :
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)