Haint Blue: A Tipsy Collins Novel

by Stephanie Alexander

Overview

Clairvoyant single mom Tipsy Collins is easing into a post-divorce new normal. She's solved a century-old murder mystery and brought peace to her house. She's rebuilding her artistic career and co-parenting with her ornery ex-husband. She's hopeful that her boyfriend is Mr. Right. Mercurial phantom Henry Mott still haunts her house, but he's become a dear friend. Tipsy plans to return to her lifelong habit of ignoring restless spirits. 

A series of sudden financial and personal setbacks leave her feeling like she's back to square one, until a new friendship offers unexpected financial salvation. Ivy More has been haunting a Sullivan's Island cottage since the 1940s. Ivy's eccentric granddaughter, Pamella Brewton, will pay big bucks if Tipsy can figure out how to free her moody, volatile Meemaw. It turns out there was more to Ivy's death than a simple swan dive off the dock at low tide. To complicate matters, Ivy had a secret lover. Shockingly, he's someone Tipsy has seen before. 

As Tipsy struggles with heartbreak, her ex-husband's shenanigans, and a growing sense of frustration with life, she turns to Henry for help solving Ivy's mystery. She finds herself learning from her brooding housemate, but also from Ivy, who has far more in common with Tipsy than either of them expect.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647043254
Publisher:	Bublish, Inc.
Publication date:	04/22/2021
Series:	Tipsy Collins Series , #2
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	534,745
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Stephanie Alexander writes enchanting, fantastical stories for thoughtful, modern women. She's a practicing family law attorney. She's also worked in women's health and international development and has taught sociology at the College of Charleston. Her professional and personal background influences many themes in her work, including patriarchy and power dynamics, the ramifications of childhood experiences, relationship and parenting challenges, and the myth of happily ever after. Stephanie lives in beautiful Charleston, South Carolina, with her husband, their blended family of five children, and their miniature dachshunds, Trinket and Tipsy.

Editorial Reviews

2021-06-13
Charleston’s favorite ghost-talking divorcée returns in Alexander’s latest supernatural mystery, the second in a series.

Reluctant clairvoyant Tipsy Collins is still trying to figure out life as a single mother of three. She’s (mostly) quieted the ghosts that haunt her home, though one, Henry Mott, has decided to hang around and work on his memoir. Tipsy’s relationship with her boyfriend, Will Garrison, is beginning to sour, and though she’s gotten back into painting, she’s still close to broke. That’s why she drives out to Sullivan’s Island to meet with the slightly kooky Pamella Brewton about a possible commission. The cottage, painted from fence to shutters in that unmistakable Southern shade called haint blue, is haunted by Pamella’s deceased grandmother, Ivy More Brewton. Ivy, the story goes, fell off a dock in 1944, but Tipsy suspects it wasn’t that simple. Tipsy doesn’t want to get involved—she’s furious Will told Pamella about her psychic abilities—but when Pamella offers $50,000 for exorcising “Meemaw,” how can Tipsy refuse? She makes contact with Ivy, who insists she can’t leave the house without her “true love,” and she isn’t talking about Pamella’s grandfather. As Tipsy’s own romantic life crumbles, can she learn something about love and loss from this stubborn ghost? Alexander’s prose is precise and evocative, particularly when she’s describing the environments of coastal South Carolina: “Tipsy is on a dune on one of those random fall afternoons in the Lowcountry that feel like summer’s hangover. The tall grass around her is brownish. The remaining yellow and white flowers droop like the tongues of panting dogs.” The novel unfolds at a leisurely pace, driven by Tipsy and her relationships as much as by the haunting plot. Alexander, as in her previous installment, Charleston Green (2020), works in the tradition of Southern women’s fiction as much as in supernatural mystery, and she blends the two genres together into a seamless, not-too-heavy exploration of how difficult it can be to act once a relationship has run its course.

A well-told, deeply felt addition to a ghostly mystery series.

Kirkus Reviews