THE PROOF IS IN THE POISON

A moonshiner’s business is almost derailed by a train-centric murder.

Although Hattie Hayes comes from a long line of moonshiners, her business in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is strictly legal, and now that she’s overcome being arrested for murder in The Moonshine Shack Murder (2021), life with her grandfather, her cat, and her boyfriend, mounted police officer Marlon Landers, seems to be on the right track. Reassured, Hattie heads off with her grandpa to a model railroad convention where she’s hosting a moonshine mixer in hopes of selling plenty of her multiflavored brews. It isn’t long before she notices tension between some of the exhibitors and even the judges as the fiercely competitive train mavens do everything to win the divisions they’ve entered. The backbiting comes to a screeching halt when obnoxious Bert Gebhardt dies, apparently poisoned by some of Hattie’s blackberry moonshine. Detective Ace Pearce, who delivers the news that Burt died from methanol poisoning, wonders whether Hattie made a mistake in processing and forces her to close her store. Although Marlon warns her to let the police handle the case, Hattie, fearing that her business is at stake, returns to the convention to snoop around among the other contestants, looking for clues that will prove that her moonshine is innocent and someone else is a deliberate poisoner.

A middling mystery with slowly developing characters for whom this agreeable sophomore installment ups the ante.