Murder on the Mullet Express (Three Snowbirds)

When traveling with Percival Pettijohn, it was best to bring a sidearm. It’s 1926. The West Coast Development Company is staging its biggest land deal in Homosassa, Florida, selling pieces of a planned city to speculators who dream of a tropical paradise. Army nurse Cornelia Pettijohn takes leave to travel to Florida with her ancient uncle, Percival Pettijohn, who claims that he wants a warm winter home. When their car breaks down, they take the local train, The Mullet Express, into Homosassa. Immediately after climbing aboard, things go awry. A passenger is poisoned, and dies despite Cornelia’s best efforts to save him. A second murder victim boards the train back to Ocala, iced down with the fish. Uncle Percival, who has a hidden agenda for the trip, becomes the sheriff’s prime suspect. Some gangsters also take an unsettling interest in the retired professor. Cornelia and Teddy Lawless, a twenty-year-old flapper in a body pushing sixty, must chase mobsters and corner suspects to dig her uncle out of the hole he’s dug for himself.