2017
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
COURTESY OF THE COUNTRY BOOKSHOP
82
MURDER, WITH A SIDE OF GREEN BEANS a review by Teresa Bryson Ruth Moose. Wedding Bell Blues: A Dixie Dew Mystery. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016.
TERESA BRYSON, a Pennsylvania native, received her BA in English with a concentration in writing from Shippensburg University. While an undergraduate, she was a fiction editor for the university’s literary journal, The Reflector, and a national spokesperson and educator for the American Beekeeping Federation. Currently, she is working on her MA in English at East Carolina University where she is serving as an editorial assistant for the NCLR and the Donne Variorum, while writing her thesis, which is a mystery novel. A native North Carolinian, RUTH MOOSE taught creative writing at UNC Chapel Hill for fifteen years and now lives in Pittsboro, NC. She has a BA from Pfeiffer University and an MLS from UNC Greensboro, and she did post-graduate work at the Universities of Virginia and Massachusetts, Shenandoah University, and Oxford University in England. Moose has published three collections of short stories: The Wreath Ribbon Quilt (St. Andrews Press, 1987), Dreaming in Color (August House, 1989), and Neighbors and Other Strangers (Main Street Rag, 2010). Read her short story “Playing Baby Dolls with the Girls” in NCLR 2002.
ABOVE RIGHT Ruth Moose reading at The Country Bookshop, Southern Pines, NC, 18 May 2014
In Ruth Moose’s second novel, Wedding Bell Blues, a sequel to Doing It at the Dixie Dew (2014, reviewed in NCLR Online 2015), murder returns to Littleboro, NC, and the Dixie Dew Bed and Breakfast. Beth McKenzie, owner of the Dixie Dew and Littleboro native, has her hands full with trying to revive her B&B, preparing for Littleboro’s First Annual Green Bean Festival, and making a seven-layer cake for Juanita and Ossie’s garden wedding. With a dwindling income and the gazebo Juanita requested not even started, Beth’s problems are just beginning. Wedding Bell Blues opens with Beth receiving a call from Crazy Reba, a harmless, childlike Littleboro resident, who claims that she killed her fiancé, God. Beth is skeptical to say the least. “For a month Reba had been talking about being a June bride. Pure imagination, but with Reba you didn’t argue” (3). The town went along with the idea and even made a wedding dress and cake for Reba. However, when Beth arrives at Motel 3 by “the four lane road” called an interstate, she finds Reba leaning over the body of a man with a large green bean colored stain on his shirt (3). Beth is stunned to
discover not only that he exists but also that Reba’s engagement ring is on his lifeless finger. Ossie DelGardo, Littleboro’s chief of police, has one suspect: Reba. Beth, convinced of Reba’s innocence, takes it upon herself to discover what really happened and who was sharing champagne and KFC in the hotel room with Reba. Later, Beth receives a threatening phone call, and a famous food writer and festival judge suddenly becomes ill. When the judge is found dead in her room at the B&B, suspicion shifts to Beth, and no one in Littleboro is safe. Beth struggles to prove Reba’s innocence as the killer closes in and Littleboro is visited by an arsonist. In terms of plot, Moose excels at keeping her reader guessing. As Beth tries to balance her obligations at the B&B with looking for Robert Redford (her neighbor’s missing rabbit) and discovering the identity of Reba’s fiancé, small events begin to connect and paint a vivid and complex picture of Littleboro and small-town life. Seemingly unrelated events – late night airport trips, an empty tractor trailer, a green bean fight, a “trashion” show – all meet to enhance the suspense. In this sense, Wedding Bell Blues keeps the reader guessing and avoids being predictable. The misdirection and red