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Dance On His Grave by Sylvia Dickey Smith. When Sidra Smart, the fifty-year-old ex-wife of a fundamentalist preacher, inherits her brother’s detective agency, she learns that a lifetime spent on a pedestal before her husband’s congregation has left her ill prepared to face the dark world of criminal investigation.
But when Jewell Stone bursts in with vague flashbacks of a grisly 30-year-old murder committed by her father, Roy Manly, Sid plunges into a surreal world where passion burns as hot as the memories of child
abuse, arson and murder.
As if murder isn’t enough to occupy Sid’s every waking thought, she must also deal with her own internal conflicts as she comes face to face with the real world now that she’s stepped down off her pedestal of ‘the preacher’s wife’.
Intrigued by Jewell’s memories, but clueless as to procedure, Sid visits veteran private investigator George Leger, and this Cajun-speaking, rot-gut drinking man soon enchants her.
After he offers to supervise Sid until she gains state licensure, she travels to the Caribbean in search of Jewell’s sister, Emma Barfield, hoping she can refute the macabre memories. Instead, Emma reinforces them, saying, “When my father dies, I swear, I will drink tequila and dance on his grave.”
Convinced that Emma and Jewell’s father murdered a woman in the early 1970s and burned her remains in a house fire, Sid returns to Cajun country to unravel the tangled web of murder.
Soliciting the help of district attorney, Ben Hillerman, Sid and Ben search archived newspaper records. They know they are onto something when they find an article about a farmhouse consumed by fire, and the remains of Ethel Elaine Perry in the burned-out structure. When Ben invites Sid to dinner to discuss the case, the meeting switches to more intimate conversation and, a whirlwind of senses charge over Sid before the night ends. Still caught in her own wounded past, she struggles to keep Ben at arms length.
Nancy Manly, Jewell and Emma’s mother is found smothered to death two days after Sid visits her. Sid barely survives an attack on her own life when a truck rams her car off the road, plunging it into the Sabine River. Now she must uncover the truth fast before the murderer catches her.
At the request of her client, she and Sid ease through dark swamp in a pirogue paddled by an old man more mysterious that the bayou. They have an appointment with a psychic whose house sits on stilts in the middle of marshland. The psychic talks to dead people, Sid has been told. What she discovers smacks in the face of her beliefs about life, death, and life hereafter.
After an elusive blue flame leads Sid across state lines, she learns the truth of what happened on that day so many years earlier, and that’s when things really get sticky. Sid finds herself in a replay of the murder scene, except this time she’s the victim. The choice is simple. She must draw on a strength she never knew she possessed, or give up and die. Sid chooses life.
About the Author
Born in Orange, Texas, Sylvia Dickey Smith entered this world backwards—feet first and left-handed—and says she’s done most things backward ever since.
At seventeen, she married a local boy and became the “pastor’s wife” while still a senior at Stark High School. After graduation, the two moved to Fort Worth where he attended seminary, and then later, to several small Texas towns where he pastored local Baptist churches. After being appointed as foreign missionaries to the Caribbean island of Trinidad, they lived and worked there for six years before returning to the U.S, and settling in El Paso, Texas.
At 41 Sylvia took her first freshman class at the University of Texas at El Paso and fought her way to a BA in Sociology and a Masters in Educational Psychology, all while rearing four children, being a pastor’s wife, and a foreign missionary.
After graduation, her life took a different turn. She struck out on her own and began a career as a single mother working with non-profit and for-profit organizations within the human services field, and conducting private practice as a licensed professional counselor and marriage and family therapist.
Several years later, she married a retired Army Colonel, and they eventually relocated to the central Texas area where she continued employment within the human services field. After retirement, she took on the challenge to write a mystery novel.
After she decided to set her mystery series in Orange, she conducted research on the area and found a rich history she’d never known existed. She discovered a fascinating county full of folks from all walks of life, and of all color, each with an iron strength and determination. She also developed a new sense of awe and respect for the meandering Sabine and Neches Rivers, once plied by Paleo-Indians, pirate schooners, steamboat captains, Confederate Cottonclads, and then WW II Destroyers.
The result of this research inspired her to weave the past with the present in Sidra Smart and The Third Eye mystery series. The first book, Dance On His Grave, is available at bookstores now. The second book, DEADLY SINS-DEADLY SECRETS, launches November 1, 2007.
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