MISS JULIA TO THE RESCUE

The trouble with men is they constantly need women to rescue them.

Miss Julia, so glutted with southern manners that she’s befriended the mistress and child of her first husband, the late Wesley Springer, receives a call from that woman’s new husband, Mr. Pickens, asking help of Miss Julia’s current husband. Mr. Pickens, a private eye, doesn’t say why or where he is exactly, but since Miss Julia’s better half is off touring the Holy Land, it falls to her to find the caller. Leaving the architect, the carpenters, the painters and the plumbers to get on with redecorating her home, she insists that the bodacious Etta Mae, a repository of medical know-how, accompany her on a trip to the wilds of West Virginia where, she believes, Mr. Pickens has been searching for a missing person. Currently, however, the searcher’s sequestered in a hospital room with gun wounds on his backside, any contact with him forbidden by the local sheriff. Undaunted, Miss Julia and Etta Mae, after an agonizing visit to an assembly of snake-handlers, climb through windows, don disguises, manhandle Mr. Pickens into their car and drive him home to recover. That pesky sheriff, enamored of Etta Mae, follows just as Miss Julia embarks on a rescue of Adam, a worker at her house who’s gotten entangled with a slew of tattooed, body-pierced zealots out at Agnes Whitman’s place. 

Plot loopholes abound, along with religious claptrap that allows the decorous heroine (Miss Julia Rocks the Cradle, 2011, etc.) to proselytize for her more temperate Presbyterian lifestyle.