Finding Roda Anne

From the Deep South, comes Deloris Meek, Esquire, a fast-talking, animated lawyer who practices law during the 1960s out of a converted milk truck. He is not a lawyer one would retain on a good day having flunked the bar exam on his first try. One afternoon, he meets an auctioneer and agrees to draft his will, later consenting to be the executor and lawyer for the auctioneer's estate. When the auctioneer dies, Meek's problems begin. Not only must he search for the auctioneer's sole heir, Roda Anne Harrison, he must also contend with three disgruntled claimants to the property. After being chased from the auctioneer's funeral, Meek begins preparations for the drive to Texas in search of the heir. During the trip, he will be accompanied part-way by Dixie St. John, a "float-qualified" legal secretary. Thus begins a journey in and out of courtrooms, a honky-tonk, a tent revival, and a hospital. When he returns home, he faces a lawsuit before a probate judge devoted to using baseball terms and metaphors. As with The Trials of Lawyer Pratt, the tenor of the story is witty, engaging, and Southern to the hilt with its memorable characters.

Bert Goolsby is a former Chief Deputy Attorney General of South Carolina and a former Judge of the South Carolina Court of Appeals. A native of Alabama, having been raised in Dothan, he and his wife the former Mary Ellen "Prue" Fraser of Walterboro, South Carolina, make their home in Columbia. He earned an undergraduate degree at The Citadel, a law degree at the University of South Carolina, and an advanced law degree at the University of Virginia.