"All My Bones"

P.J. Nelson is the pseudonym of an award-winning actor, dramatist, professor, and novelist (among other many other professions) who has done just about everything except run a bookstore. He lives in Decatur, Georgia.

The author applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, All My Bones, with the following results:

Page sixty-nine of All My Bones is, remarkably, the page on which the Reverend Gloria Coleman is arrested, an event which is the proverbial crux of the biscuit—to be specific, the crux of the buttermilk biscuit. (We are, after all, in the Deep South.) The narrator of this and all the Old Juniper Bookshop mysteries is Madeline Brimley, an Atlanta actor, who inherited the bookshop from her Aunt Rose, a New York actor. Gloria Coleman, one of Madeline’s best friends, is the Episcopal priest whose church is just across the road from the bookshop. She’s seen arguing with Idell Glassie, the richest woman in the small town of Enigma, Georgia. The problem is that Idell’s sister, Beatrice, had been missing for months when Madeline and Gloria find Bea’s bones. They were only digging up the front yard of the shop to plant azaleas, and there they were. Idell knows that sister Bea and Reverend Gloria were at odds over church affairs. Now Idell, only a little out of her mind, has decided that Gloria murdered Bea. Without a shred of proof. But since Idell has money, she also has influence, which she uses to force the GBI to arrest Gloria. For most of the rest of the book, Madeline works tirelessly to prove Gloria’s innocence. That work includes confronting other citizens of Enigma, all of whom disliked the deceased intensely, including a handyman whom Beatrice refused to pay and the owner of the town diner whom Beatrice tried to force out of business. Madeline’s investigations even take her to the allegedly haunted opera house in nearby Hawkinsville, and to Kell Brady, the wealthy ex-boyfriend of Bea Glassie, who spent a fortune restoring the old hall with Bea’s help. So, as it happens, page sixty-nine is the page upon which, to a great degree, the entire rest of the book depends!

Read more about All My Bones at the publisher's website.

My Book, The Movie: All My Bones.

--Marshal Zeringue