Cathy Pickens - Southern Fried Mystery (#1-5)

Southern Fried (Southern Fried Mystery #1)
Attorney Avery Andrews left her BMW behind in Columbia, South Carolina, along with her job at a high-powered law firm. She's come back home to Dacus where the vehicle of choice is a pickup truck with a dog chained in the back. Avery wants time to rethink her career and her life. What she gets is a bossy great aunt drumming up clients and dragging her to social teas. That's how Avery ends up hired by a local factory to help with a messy environmental problem. But she's at Luna Lake when divers find a car containing a corpse because an old high school classmate is trying to get her attention with a half-baked stunt. Now, the discovery of the dead body sweeps Avery into a red hot case...and into the sizzling secrets of small town life, where some people get away with murder.

Done Gone Wrong (Southern Fried Mystery #2)
A chance to be a part of a headline-grabbing case against a drug company has lured attorney Avery Andrews back to Charleston, South Carolina. She agrees to meet with Mark Tilman, a young doctor from her home town who seems to have something on his mind. When he doesn't show, she figures he stood her up and takes comfort in the stilt restaurant's she-crab soup. But it turns out he had a fatal car accident. Something about the crash isn't right, and Mark's father asks Avery to look into his death. Between that and digging up dirt on the wonder drug Uplift, Avery is coming up with more questions than answers.

Of course, Avery isn't the only one making headlines. Back in Dacus, her mom is on live television confronting a teenager's dynamite-toting paramour in a hostage crisis at the Burger Hut, Great-Aunt Aletha is mixing it up with the now-toupee-less postman, and the son of a ghost wants vengeance. In short, it's life as usual back in Dacus, while in Charleston, Avery is forced to face demons from her own past.

Hog Wild (Southern Fried Mystery #3)
A runaway pig is about as explosive a piece of news as there is to be found in Dacus at the moment. But shortly after Avery Andrews has returned to her hometown, all hell breaks loose.

Her new office is still in disorder when Maggy Avinger arrives, clutching a copy of her dead husband's letter to his lawyer. He's made arrangements for an enormous stone angel to be erected at his grave and for the angel's plaque to read that Maggy murdered him. His doctor says Harden died of lung cancer, so he's really got some nerve. Plus--and what really bothers Maggy--the garish angel is in such bad taste!

Avery promises to look into it. In the meantime, Maggy invites her to a native plant rescue at the site of a new development. A dead body is found crammed into an abandoned mine hole and a series of gruesome deaths follow. Avery discovers that the victims had received anonymous letters accusing them of various ethical shortcomings. With the help of an attractive reporter who seems too good for her father's humble paper, Avery seeks to find a connection between the disasters and nab a killer.

Hush My Mouth (Southern Fried Mystery #4)
A spring day brings attorney Avery Andrews a new case. Fran French comes from Atlanta looking for her friend Neanna, who’s more like a sister to her. Neanna went to Dacus looking for information on the unsolved murder of her aunt Wenda, and now she’s missing.

Twenty years earlier, Wenda’s body was found posed on a memorial bench in the cemetery, her packed luggage at her feet, as if ready for a journey. When Neanna is found in her car, dead from a shot to the head, the police want to call it suicide. Fran insists it’s impossible that Neanna killed herself and urges Avery to help her prove it.

While Avery is sifting through Neanna’s and Wenda’s confused past and present, her office mate Melvin Bertram is befriended by a trio of ghost hunters who arrive in search of ectoplasm from the long-dead. The trio, christened “the ghosters” by Avery, hope to talk Melvin into investing in their TV pilot, oblivious to the fact that someone is baiting them with increasingly ridiculous ghost sightings. In no time at all, the ghosters are having altercations with the resident biker gang and with Avery’s private investigator. Let no one say life in Camden County is uninteresting.

Can't Never Tell (Southern Fried Mystery #5)
It's another Fourth of July in Dacus, South Carolina and the carnival fright house isn't impressing Avery's 7-year-old niece Emma. That is, until the leg falls off a mannequin posed with a chainsaw. Then even Emma recognizes the human leg bone protruding from the wizened limb.

The next day, Avery joins her sister Lydia and her brother-in-law at a faculty picnic up on the mountain. The festivities are interrupted when one of the faculty wives disappears off the waterfall.

Between the owners of the fright house wanting Avery to help them get reopened before they miss out on the holiday crowd, and the widower's new protective lady friend insisting that someone needs to be safeguarding his financial interests, Avery has her work cut out for her. She finds herself following the money as she pieces together a very cold case and a very cold-blooded murder.