Stacked Shelves

Readers of so-called “cozy mysteries” know you can run into problems when the same small town experiences too many odd deaths. After a while even Miss Marple probably stopped getting party invites (“Let’s not invite Miss Marple this weekend. There’s always some ghastly murder when she’s around.” “Quite.”) But there’s no problem yet with Sheila Turnage’s Tupelo Landing series (for kids, grades 4-6). In Three Times Lucky , a murder comes to tiny Tupelo Landing, N.C., and prompts our protagonist Moses LoBeau (aka Mo) to set up the Desperado Detective Agency with her best friend Dale Earnhardt Johnson III. The crime hits very close to home for our young detectives, but not so close that one of the main characters is the villain. In The Ghosts of Tupelo Landing , the newest book, the murder took places years ago, so our town of quirky characters is somewhat safe, though not without their secrets.  Turnage’s characters do border on caricature. There’s the bombastic mayor, the go