When Jacob Vandeventer shows up at Haskell Blevin's office one day and tells him that he needs him to protect his daughter from a possible kidnapper, Haskell accepts the case. But protecting Priss isn't going to be easy, because she doesn't want him anywhere near her. But stay around he does, and it isn't long before not only is Priss not kidnapped, her father is found dead in his office, stabbed and bludgeoned with a bronze chicken.

While the suspect list narrows down - namely to it being Priss's mother Ruby - and Priss insists her mother couldn't kill anyone, Haskell has his doubts. But then the stakes are suddenly raised when it appears that they don't want Haskell to find out the truth, even if it means he's the next to go...

I don't really think I had high hopes for this book after reading the first one (and I didn't like all the animal cruelty and death in that one) but I did have hopes that the author would find another subject, so I decided to read it. It's not one of the best I've read, but then again it's not one of the worst ones, either.

While I think the author was trying to make Haskell sound like a good ol' country boy come back home to his roots, he really comes off as a yokel. I mean, she describes him as looking like Howdy Doody (it was a television show many years ago with a red-headed cowboy puppet). I have a hard time believing that someone who looked like that would have made a decent homicide detective. How could they investigate cases if people were constantly staring at the person because of their looks? Homicide detectives need to have, shall we say, a presence that makes people tell them things, and let me tell you, I wouldn't be spilling my guts to someone who resembled a kid's cartoon.

Anyway, the plot itself is pretty decent, and the book was better than the first one, but we were left with a lot of unanswered questions about what had been going on in the book, and I really hate the fact that the author didn't tie up loose ends or let the reader know certain things that had been hinted at throughout the book.

The subplot of Haskell's dog Rip terrorizing the neighborhood might have been funny if it weren't so ridiculous. No two dogs look exactly alike. So they weighed the same amount? Had the exact same markings? The neighbor - who must have known about Rip's "little problem" before this suddenly believed it was miraculously cured? Yeah, sure.

As you can tell, I wasn't thrilled with this, but I still hold out hope that the author will improve with the third book in the series. ( )