Southern comfort mystery

This was another disappointing read for me.  I am sliding into double cannonball range with a string of books that are just not doing it for me!  This was a random grab at the library, and unfortunately it’s book #15 (!!) in the Sarah Booth Delaney series – not a good idea to jump into something so far along into its run.

As per the Amazon blurb:  Sarah Booth Delaney is heartbroken: her fiancé Graf Milieu has decided to move to Hollywood permanently, leaving their relationship in shambles. Sarah Booth has a perfect distraction, however, in the form of the Black and Orange Halloween ball her best friends are throwing in New Orleans. Sarah Booth plans to dance the night away to the swinging tunes of her old flame Scott Hampton’s blues band. But just as the party gets going, Scott receives a mysterious message that threatens his life and the lives of his bandmates.

Now, this sounded interesting but I quickly discovered that Sarah Booth (which is the only way she is referred to, never just Sarah for reasons I don’t understand) has a complicated past history with ex-boyfriends who are all still interested in her.  While she is nursing her broken heart, the men in her life are all ready to jump back into a relationship with her if she would have them.  She lives alone in a large home in Zinnia Mississippi, with her dog and cat, and owns a few horses.  There’s a restless ghost that makes regular appearances, who is apparently her great-great-grandmother’s nanny and dispenses words of wisdom from beyond the grave.  Sarah Booth is also an investigator of some sort with her best friend, Tinkie (yes that’s the name, not sure if it’s a nickname or what).  So when death threats start to pile up for Scott to close his new blues club or else, she is naturally going to jump in and investigate, as you do.

I admit to being lost as to the recurring characters and their relationships – and there are a lot of them.  Sarah Booth seems to have a habit of charging into situations without thinking of the consequences, which is also a recurring theme from what I can tell.  She does love her animals, and there is an amusing revenge anecdote that she cooks up with one of her male admirers after  his dog was kidnapped (and she rescued).  Still, the story just didn’t capture me, and I quickly tired of reading ‘Sarah Booth’ over and over again and I have no desire to start with book one of this series.