Savvy Summers and the Sweet Potato Crimes: A MysteryWhen Savvy Summers first opened Essie's soul food cafe, she never expected her customer favorite sweet potato pie to become the center of a murder investigation. But when Grandy Jaspers, the 75 year old neighborhood womanizer, drops dead at table two, she suddenly has more to worry about than just maintaining Essie's reputation for the finest soul food in the Chicagoland area. Even as the police deem Grandy's death an accident, Savvy quickly finds

[this novel] traces the lives of each of the Marte women

Yet just as he begins to embrace who he is

Alliances are fracturing

and the puppet show they'd been looking forward to going to all week

Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire

attractive new neighbor

In the media fallout

Fertile and lifegiving

and fathers and sons in this story of discovering and reclaiming a painful past

he's transfixed

they remain as close as sisters

Deonn adeptly employs the haunting history of the American South ("the low buzzing sound of exclusion") to explore themes of ancestral pain