Created by Kim Carter
Introduced in Sweet Dreams, Baby Belle (2017), elderly widows CLARA SAMPLES and IRIS HADLEY are nobody’s spring chickens (they’re both “well into their seventies”) when they decide to form a detective agency in a less-than-ideal part of Atlanta–without a lick of investigative experience between them.
But they are long-time best friends, nextdoor neighbors and fellow widows, both well into their seventies, in a cozy-ish series of mysteries by Kim Carter.
Clara is the calm one—steady, reliable, and reasonable. Iris is, well… she’s not exactly Grandma Mazur, but she’s more impulsive, more prone to action, be it spouting off or leaping to conclusions.
It’s a teeter-totter of a relationship, with the two chipping away at each other, gossiping, bickering and berating, even occasionally insulting each other, but there’s no doubt that their friendship is a deep and abiding one. It’s also often a hoot, as the two work their way through investigations, nitpicking and nattering along the way.
Hadley And Samples Investigations, riding in the black by their third adventure, The Root Of All Evil (2024), has even accumulated an office manager. Tech-savvy, twenty-one-year-old Quita, who conveniently lives in the apartment above the, and is still amazed at how effective her two elder employers are as detectives, marveling at how they’ve become “a force to be reckoned with.”
Of course, it helps that in their short tenure as professional detectives the two have developed close working relationships with a couple of Atlanta homicide dicks, a pair of local medical examiners and possibly best of all, Stanley “Sugar” Peters, the local morgue attendant.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A college graduate of Saint Leo University with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology, Kim Carter‘s writing career began when a serious illness left herhousebound for a couple of years, with her health struggles (and literary successes) subsequently chronicled on Lifetime Television in early 2000, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Women’s Day Magazine, and Guidepost. Back on her feet, Kim has worked in many different capacities in county government, including corrections officer, which has given her plenty of accesshomicide detectives, medical examiners, and prison officials. The author resides and shares her time in Biloxi, MS., and Atlanta, Georgia.
NOVELS
- Sweet Dreams, Baby Belle (2017) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!
- Murder Among The Tombstones (2017) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!
- The Root of All Evil (2024) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- Hand Me Down My Walking Cane…
Call it “Geezer Noir” if you must, but these old dicks ain’t goin’ gentle into that good night…
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
