Drenched in southern charm, laced with family shenanigans, and packed with quirky humor, Claire Matturro’s SWEETHEART DEAL is a smart and sassy new suspense novel about a lawyer who must roll up her sleeves and take on the case of her life—her mama.

After engaging critics and readers alike with Wildcat Wine, Bone Valley, and the award-winning Skinny-Dipping, Claire Matturro returns with the sharp, sexy and loveably neurotic vegetarian attorney Lilly Belle Rose Cleary. Lilly is yanked from her life in Florida when her brother Dan phones with the startling news that their reclusive, phobic mother—who hasn’t left her house in years—is not only lying comatose in the local hospital, but is accused of murder. Though Lilly vowed to never return to her hometown (for good reason!) after graduating from high school twenty years ago, she cannot refuse Dan’s plea, especially given such strange circumstances; it seems that Lilly’s mother shot a man in a dispute over a freezer full of voodoo eggs (yes, voodoo eggs).

Lilly arrives in Georgia just in time to discover the body of her old high school crush, a county commissioner with some dubious dealings, smothered under a load of sweet feed.  Then, a trio of meddling teens, including Lilly’s nephew, goes missing, along with an albino ferret harboring some serious Lassie fantasies.  If all this isn’t enough to keep Lilly half crazy and too busy, she’s also got to juggle someone trying to kill her over-sedated mother along with the demands of her work, including a pesky lawsuit back in Sarasota that needs fixing pronto. But despite being armed with little more than her cell phone, her cunning, and her high tolerance for risk no matter how tumultuous the circumstances, Lilly always seems to crack the case with her shrewd sense of humor intact.