This is the second of this series that I’ve read, and I’m really enjoying it. Miss Julia, recently widowed and recently wealthy, was originally not with much in the way of a family other than her housekeeper/best friend Lillian. But now there’s Hazel Marie, her late husband’s young mistress, and her son, Little Lloyd, to add to the mix. And she has a big house that’s pretty empty (always was), so why not?
So when Hazel Marie goes on a date with the church fundraiser and doesn’t turn up for a day or two, Miss Julia aims to find her. To compound matters, Brother Vern, Little Lloyd’s uncle who is intent on laying his hands on Lloyd’s sizeable inheritance, is doing his best to have the missing Hazel Marie declared an unfit mother and has had a judge issue a snatch and grab for him. Fortunately the child is at school, and then he was going to stay with a friend, and how could a pair of older ladies be expected to remember all the details?
It’s a wild ride after that, with Julia, the detective she has hired, and Little Lloyd on a wild chase to track down Hazel Marie while Lillian fends off the forces of the law on the home front. Luckily, Miss Julia has many unsuspected talents, such as outrunning a RV on an icy racetrack (“Well, I’d been driving on crooked mountain roads for most of my life and, when you’ve seen one hairpin turn, you’ve seen them all.”)
All’s well that ends well, and I am definitely going to track down more of this series. Feisty older ladies are so very much my jam.
