Drop Dead Red (Mercy Watts Mysteries)

Nothing's easy in The Big Easy.

Mercy Watts is barely back in St. Louis before her hometown suffers the worst crime in a century, a mass murder at the Tulio Italian restaurant. This tragedy has nothing to do with Mercy and she's determined to keep it that way. No news. No gossip. No evidence. Mercy doesn't want to know. But there are some things she can't avoid, her family and her friends.

Her plan seems to be working. The murderer, Kent Blankenship, is caught, but then Officer Joey Ameche shows up. He has a marker and he's calling it in, much to Mercy's dismay. His sister, Donatella's husband and in-laws were killed at Tulio. Donatella and her children avoided the massacre in a way that the cops find suspicious. Mercy has plenty of suspicions, too. How did Donatella's kids end up in the hospital just at the right time. Does she have a connection to the murderer? Would a mother infect her children with a deadly disease?

The Tulio murders lead Mercy to her smallest criminal yet, a tiny bacteria with huge potential for murder. She traces that nasty bugger to New Orleans, her mother's hometown, where the crimes keep adding up and the lies are thicker than Nana's gumbo.