Huckleberry Finished

Set aboard a Mark Twain–themed cruise on the not-so-peaceful Mississippi, Washburn's snappy second mystery to feature literary travel agent Delilah Dickinson (after 2008's Frankly My Dear, I'm Dead ) shows how much mischief a tour group can get into while confined to a moving paddle wheeler. When one of Delilah's charges, Ben Webster, causes a scene in the casino, the captain calls Delilah on the carpet. Ben later vanishes only to reappear as a corpse. Meanwhile, a charming onboard Mark Twain impersonator, Mark Lansing, takes a shine to Delilah, but turns out to have more than one identity to hide. And Mark isn't alone in harboring secrets, as one teary-eyed tour group member confides that a riverboat employee was murdered precisely one year earlier on the same tract of waterway. Delilah saves more than the day as Washburn smoothly infuses this cozy with hints of romance and humor as well as glimpses of Twain sights in today's Hannibal, Mo. (Nov.)