[Mayhem Mystery 01] • Love and Mayhem at the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park

Welcome to the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park, just outside Ochre Water, California. The annual talent show is imminent, a strange wind is blowing and the residents are restless. On a night full of bad tempers and worse weather, a body is found face-down by Space 48.

Who killed the Right Reverend Henry Heaven? Was it the park’s hussy, Fossetta Sweet, scorned by the Reverend for her loose ways and sweet smile? Was it Manager Tender LaCour, who pines for Fossetta under the glare of his suspicious little hen of a wife? Or was it their daughter Raven, a trucker with a taste for pretty men and a scandalous past?

While residents fine-tune their musical instruments and murder theories, Sheriff Memphis LaCour seeks the truth among friends, family members, and the pillars of the tight-knit community of the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park.

Karen Berry writes with a beautiful sense of language, a keen eye for detail, a masterful ear for dialogue, and most of all a sense of humor that will not only make you glad you read this book, but will make you happy just to be alive. There are belly laughs a-plenty to be found here, and a few tears as well. Love and Mayhem at the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park is a very special book by a highly gifted writer.

-- William Kowalski, author of Eddie’s Bastard and The Hundred Hearts

Karen Berry makes a sublime kind of magic on these pages. Her characters proselytize, rhapsodize, nitpick and rejoice, hearts crooning with regret and jubilation. Berry hits the sweet spots dead-on, plucking the heart strings as the wind picks up and blows the dark dreams down.

-- Tiffany Midge, author of The Woman Who Married a Bear (winner of the Kenyon Review Earthworks Indigenous Poetry Prize) and Outlaws, Renegades and Saints; Diary of a Mixed-up Halfbreed (winner of the Diane Decorah Memorial Poetry Prize)

Love and Mayhem at the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park is both a delightfully madcap romp through a week in the lives of more crazy characters than you can shake a stick at, and a luscious work of gorgeous, serious literature. Sly and funny, Love and Mayhem begins on a high note and never lets up. I loved the lush descriptions of haunting music and romantic yearning, and I was sad when the book ended. Sequel, please!

-- Shannon Page, author of Eel River