Wiped Out

Barbara C. Colley. Kensington Publishing Corporation, $22 (259pp) ISBN 978-0-7582-0762-3

Cleaning-service professional Charlotte LaRue enters the elite New Orleans garden-club world in Barbara Colley's Wiped Out: A Charlotte LaRue Mystery, the middling fourth outing (after 2004's Polished Off) for the amateur sleuth with an uncanny knack for attracting murder-here the poisoning of Mimi Adams, the much-gossiped-about president of the Horticultural Heritage Society. A wealth of verbal sniping makes up for a shortage of gardening detail. Agent, Evan Marshall. .

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