For starters, the Birdsong brothers have built themselves a chicken restaurant. The grand opening has the whole town out ready to sample "broiled chicken, baked chicken, barbecued chicken, chicken and dumplings, sweet-and-sour chicken, chicken croquettes, fried chicken." But what the citizens aren't ready for is finding three-hundred-pound Firman Birdsong under the restaurant's kitchen table, festooned with white-flour gravy and as dead as one of the hapless birds.
Although the timid florist Butch Hickly has been replaced as Job's Crossing's one-man police force by Biggie's cousin Paul and Silas Wooten (yep, that is just one man), Biggie is ready to help.
And then crisis strikes the Weatherford household. J.R.'s mother, who had handed him over years before to Biggie to raise, has now authorized his other grandmother to take over the boy's care. This is a real blow. The arrival of the woman and her faux cowboy husband leaves J.R. apprehensive and miserable and Biggie with an even greater problem than the murder to solve.
When the first of these delightfully folksy mysteries, Biggie and the Poisoned Politician, was published, it charmed everyone who read it. People magazine made it their Pick of the Week. The Weatherfords and the citizens of Job's Crossing continue to charm, and this addition to the series is a welcome even for us all.
