cordell adams

Veola Cook is on a mission to solve some strange and spooky events that began before dawn on Easter in her neighborhood. While investigating, one of her neighbors calls her the nosiest old woman in Parkerville, Texas, and hangs up on her. But Veola remains undaunted, determined to keep questioning folks until she learns what scratched at her window, how trash got dumped on her front porch, and who is meeting whom in the nearby yard in the middle of the night.
As the week progresses, she gathers information from her closest friends and relatives and the families for whom she keeps house as quickly as she doles out off-the-cuff, common-sense advice to anyone within earshot—solicited or not. Her motto comes from experience not a textbook: you see it, you live it, you teach it—in that order. Veola’s investigative leads include links between a good-for-nothing man she knows and the daughter of a deceased friend, and an employer’s teenage son keeping company with one of her shady neighbors. One night when her house is broken into, she battles her intruder until he flees. The police find no leads, so she keeps sleuthing. In broad daylight the robber returns, and Veola’s enemy helps her catch him, which tests her relationship with her inner circle.
The South in the late 1960s provides the perfect backdrop for this slice-of-life story of a domestic with insatiable curiosity, a respect for and interest in keeping any man on the right track, a healthy sense of humor, and a desire to fill everyone’s bellies. Veola sweeps us into her world and shows what can be accomplished with an eleventh-grade education, the gift of gab, a cast-iron skillet, and a worn-out Bible.