Recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler and his good friends Jimmy and Barbara decide to escape the big city for a wellness and couples workshop outside of Sedona. The joint is called The Aquarius, a New Age community the locals have taken to calling The Woo-Woo Farm. But the serene retreat has much more in store than yoga mats, didgeridoos, ecstatic dancing, and aboriginal tracking. During an early morning hike, the trio encounters Americas bestselling relationship guru, Melvin Markowitz, posed for meditation and strangled to death with a luggage strap. The race is on for the three friends to find the murderer. Bruce falls for the victim's widow, Jimmy longs for the city, and Barbara minds everybody's business as usual. But when Melvin's baby sister's volatile husband "Madhouse" is also found dead, it seems everyone at the Woo-Woo Farm is suddenly in danger from more than just a handful of holistic loonies... Recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler tags along when his friends Barbara and Jimmy sign up for a couples workshop at a New Age community the locals call Woo-Woo Farm. When the obnoxious relationship guru is murdered, Barbara can't wait to start asking questions--she never can. Bruce is equally eager to investigate, because he's fallen for the prime suspect, the victim's widow. Jimmy is suffering from withdrawal from the sidewalks of New York, the Internet, round-the-clock AA meetings, and all night pizza delivery, but he's outvoted. The suspects include a vegetarian chef with impressive knife skills, the victim's sword-wielding sister, his ambitious ex-wife, a sarcastic literary agent, and a chiropractor with hands of steel. When murder strikes again, Bruce has to cut back on yoga by the lake at dawn and romance under the stars long enough to stop the killer. In Catherine Pierce's most peculiar second collection, we enter a world of longing and destruction, of death and rebirth, and of wonderfully odd girls--girls who read too much, who drink too much or not enough, who craft necklaces from earwigs and wring nostalgia from Spiro Agnew. These are poems of questions and restlessness, but also of answers of a sort. As Beth Ann Fennelly writes,?[t]he big themes here--self identity, desire, escape--are illuminated with clarity, scored musically, and enlivened with wit. The Girls of Peculiar is a fabulous book.? In Catherine Pierce's most peculiar second collection, we enter a world of longing and destruction, of death and rebirth, and of wonderfully odd girls—girls who read too much, who drink too much or not enough, who craft necklaces from earwigs and wring nostalgia from Spiro Agnew. These are poems of questions and restlessness, but also of answers of a sort. As Beth Ann Fennelly writes, “[t]he big themes here—self identity, desire, escape—are illuminated with clarity, scored musically, and enlivened with wit. The Girls of Peculiar is a fabulous book.”
