This is another bit of fallout from my arrangement with Simon & Schuster–Joan Hess’s latest from her “Arly Hanks” series. I read a bunch of these in years gone by, shortly before I started writing reviews as a regular thing.

The premise of the series is simple. Policewoman Arly Hanks, on the rebound from a failed marriage, returns to her home town of Maggody, Arkansas to spend some time collecting herself. She’s gotta eat, so she takes the job of Chief of Police for a community of gossips, inbred knuckledraggers, moonshiners, and poker-playing idiots. The only two normal folk are Arly Hanks herself, and her landlord, the local antique dealer. It’s likely that Jeff Foxworthy got most of his material from places like Maggody.

The whole thing is played for laughs, of course, with large helpings of country-fried ribaldry.

After a while the gags began to get stale, and the whole thing began to seem essentially mean-spirited, and I stopped reading them–until now. It appears that I’ve missed five or six books. There are a few differences in town. The bag boy down at the grocery store seems to have stopped making out with the checkout girl in the backroom in favor of marrying her and making out with her at home; they have twins and another on the way. And Arly Hanks has acquired a boyfriend, a development which seems to be of fairly recent vintage. But no one’s yet rebuilt the bank, which burned down a while back, and nothing much else seems to be new.

As the book begins, the county old folks home has just been closed; apparently the site has been sold to mysterious investors from California. Nobody knows anything about it, and (this being Maggody) rumors and conspiracy theories begin to develop as the entire town prepares to fly off the handle yet again. Not even Arly can find out what’s going on there…until there’s a murder at the country’s newest celebrity rehab center, the Stonebridge Foundation.

On the whole, I found it to be of similar tone and quality to the earlier books in the series; and I’ll note that I bought six or seven of those before I got tired of the whole thing. Some bits were genuinely funny, while others were clearly meant to be, and perhaps to someone else they will be. As always, your mileage may vary.