Dig: A Morgue Mama Mystery. This item is unavailable.Dig: A Morgue Mama Mystery

When sixty-eight-year-old newspaper librarian Maddy Sprowls discovers that her old college friend, archaelogist Gordon Sweet, has been found murdered at the abandoned landfill that is the site of his latest dig, she sets out to uncover the truth about the killing, which may be linked to the bludgeoning death of state wrestling champion David Delarosa a half century earlier.

So Morgue Mama was a beatnik. Who knew? In Dig, the second entry in C.R. Corwin's Morgue Mama' mystery series, Dolly Madison Sprowls -- Maddy' to her friends -- again sticks her 68-year-old nose where it doesn't belong. It belongs in the Hannawa Herald-Union's reference library, the department that some newspaper folks still affectionately call the morgue. It doesn't belong poking into the murder of Maddy's old college buddy Gordon Sweet, an archaeology professor whose body was found at the site of his dig. Back in the day, when Maddy and her Hannawa College friends founded the Meriweather Square Baked Bean Existentialist Society, Jack Kerouac's visit was more important than anything, you dig? But there was a murder back then, too, a murder that went unsolved, and Maddy thinks that just maybe the two are related. In The Cross Kisses Back, the first in the series, Maddy helped solve the murder of a televangelist. Here, she's not only out to learn who shot Sweet Gordon, ' but also who bludgeoned David Delarosa in 1957, and where some toxic chemicals were dumped, and whether Kerouac's last meal in Hannawa was a hamburger or a cheeseburger (it's really important). The Cross Kisses Back was notable for its obvious references to Akron landmarks in its Hannawa' setting. Dig's allusions are less pointed, although Maddy does drive by the Trawsfyndd Castle' Tudor mansion. The annual Grand Kerouacian Anniversary Ball, held to commemorate the poet's visit, provides no shortage of suspects. C.R. Corwin is a pseudonym for Akron author Rob Levandoski, author of Fresh Eggs and Serendipity Green. -- Barbara McIntyre, Akron Beacon Journal (1/15/2006)