No one in Sinful liked Pansy Arceneaux, but who hated her enough to kill her? 
When aspiring actress Pansy Arceneaux returns to Sinful, Louisiana, to head up the beauty pageant portion of the Summer Festival, CIA assassin Fortune Redding knows she’s in for trouble. Her undercover identity as a former beauty queen makes Fortune the perfect choice to chair the event with Pansy, but Pansy’s abrasive personality makes it impossible to get through a single rehearsal without a fight. When Pansy turns up dead, Fortune is the prime suspect. 
Armed with only her wits and two conniving seniors referred to locally as The Geritol Mafia, Fortune launches an investigation to find the real killer before her cover is blown.

iN A NUTSHELL
‘Lethal Bayou Beauty‘ was a hoot: sheer, joyful, irrepressible escapism. The plot worked (with a very willing suspension of disbelief on my part). The characters were engaging. The action was fast-paced and the humour had me chuckling.  It was a perfect lighthearted comfort read.

Lethal Bayou Beauty (2013) is the second book featuring CIA assassin Fortune Redding who is hiding out undercover in the (very) small town of Sinful, Louisiana. Fortune’s supposed to be keeping a low profile but she’s not doing a good job of it, In her first week in Sinful (described in ‘Louisiana Longshot‘). Fortune was recruited into an informal murder investigation by The Sinful Ladies, a group of single older women who run the town behind the scenes and found herself involved in breaking and entering, boat theft and a fatal shooting, 

‘Lethal Bayou Beuty‘, carried straight on from the first book and was just as much fun. Fortune doesn’t see herself as what she calls ‘a girly girl’ but her cover story has ‘Beauty Queen’ on her resumé so she finds herself dragooned into her worst nightmare: helping to prepare little girls to take part in a beauty pageant. In the process, she clashes with Pansy Arceneaux, a local beauty queen turned wannabe Hollywood actress who has returned to town unexpectedly. I loved seeing the whole ‘make me beautiful’ process through Fortune’s horrified and mystified eyes.

When Pansy turns up dead, Fortune becomes a suspect in the eyes of the whole town and the local Deputy is under pressure to arrest her or face a lynch mob, leaving Fortune no choice but to solve the murder herself.

What I liked most about this book was how irrepressibly joyful it was. The mystery was complicated enough to be interesting but it was mostly a vehicle for putting Fortune and The Sinful Ladies into impossible situations that made me laugh and let me get to know them better.

This is a series with a strong ensemble cast and Jana DeLeon does a great job in slowly building their individual personalities, sharing their backstories and creating a rapport between them that constantly feeds humour and friendship into the narrative.

One of the things I enjoyed is this ‘episode’ was discovering that Fortune has no knowledge of popular culture. She’d been so focused on carrying out assassination missions around the world that she’d never gotten around to taken-for-granted things like watching television. Her attempts at self-education gave the story another comedic twist.

I’m a fan now. I know the stories are formulaic and unrealistic but that’s actually part of what makes them great lighthearted, escapist, comfort-reading fun.