Phillis Toner hasn't had a fortunate life. People she lives with have a habit of dying on her. At the point The Bodies Out Back begins she's lost her mother and a couple of aunts and is looking for a place to live. As she's seemingly run out of relatives she resorts to the classifieds where she finds a "too good to be true" deal. A dear and dapper senior citizen by the name of Molly Montgomary wants to let the third floor of a Society Hill house in which one Pat Montgomary resides. Phillis decides to take it, even though she feels uneasy about sharing with someone she hasn't met. Her uneasiness proves to be well founded.

Not much in Joseph E. Wright's The Bodies Out Back is as it seems at first blush. For starters Pat Montgomary proves to be male and is somewhat put out at finding his aunt has rented the third floor of his home to Phillis. He rather thinks Aunt Molly is losing it. What's more, Phillis' policeman boyfriend is more than a little upset to find his woman living with another man. That Pat is gay doesn't assuage the boyfriend's anger. For one thing, the boyfriend is homophobic. For another he doesn't necessarily believe Pat is gay. It all depends which way the wind is blowing, so to speak. Phillis is frantically looking for another place to live when she finds a body. And where is this body? That's right, Out Back. Okay, so some things in the book are predictable. Phillis becomes both a suspect and a suspected target for murder, as does Pat (also predictable). They embark on a long and indirect investigation of each other and assorted eccentric neighbors, discovering all sorts of interesting clues and stuff, including another corpse or so, but not whether it was Professor Mustard in the kitchen with a pipe wench, at least not until the end. And yes, that also is predictable. So sue me.

The line forms on the right. The Bodies Out Back is filled with so many red herrings the reader should be able to make bouillabaisse well before the end. There proves to be method in Molly Montgomary's madness and madness in various other peoples' methodicalness. Although a careful and experienced mystery reader should be able to figure out "who done it" well before the story is over, it really doesn't matter. Like many things in life, and life in general, the journey is at least as much fun as arrival at the destination (okay, that metaphor sucks--in life one normally doesn't want to arrive at the destination, or become "a body out back".) Anyway, author Wright has a fine sense of whimsy, and gives us a cast of delightfully unlikely characters almost worthy of Tom Robbins. This is going to be a short review, at least for this reviewer. The Bodies Out Back is an airtight and air-light quasi-cozy mystery. Analysis in depth would be both pointless and inappropriate. Read it and enjoy it. The Bodies Out Back gets four cones of cotton-candy out of a possible five.