Rebecca Burns Aldridge

A deserted sailboat. A gruesome “catch” by a fisherman. A woman’s “accidental” death. Her friends’ suspicions. Their subsequent dangerous–sometimes comic–investigation.

Four women, who live in various places of the South and are known to one another only through email, are brought together by a shattering phone call. That call tells them of the shocking and, to them, unsatisfactorily explained death of their mutual friend, Maggie Muldoon Palmer, a wealthy philanthropist in Mississippi. At Maggie’s funeral, in a simultaneous move that surprises the four strangers, they each lay a yellow rose, Maggie’s favorite flower, on the casket.

“The flower girls,” as they refer to themselves after the funeral, are not the usual run-of-the-mill detectives. Ranging in age from mid-forty to seventy, they are not the svelte, hip, grown-up version of Nancy Drew. It’s “The Golden Girls” meet Agatha Christie!

Although they are all single-or-single-again southern women, they are as different as can be. Tootsie dresses garishly, constantly nibbles peanut butter, and lives on the edge; the only thing Bippy likes more than eating is playing matchmaker; Penelope avoids wearing hearing aids because she is just “a little hard of hearing” and wears clothes that look as if she robbed a Goodwill box; Rosemary, a forty-something African American newspaper editor, betrayed by her ex-husband, is trying to resist falling in love.

With good humor, suspicion, and determination to get to the bottom of things, they distrust everyone: the man Maggie was going to marry, her brothers, and even the detective assigned to the case. All four Flower Girls are unprepared, not only for the danger which lies in wait for them by their stubborn refusal to accept Maggie’s death as an accident, but for the extent to which their lives are changed forever by their friendship.