Monday, June 2, 2008

Dead Over Heels-Charlaine Harris

Dead Over Heels
Charlaine Harris
Berkley, Aug 2008, $7.99
ISBN: 9780425223031

In Lawrenceton, Georgia strange, sometimes dangerous things occur around Aurora “Roe” Teagarden, but nothing seems to directly happen to her. As Roe and her bodyguard Angel are in her garden, suddenly a body falls from the sky leaving a deep imprint on her lawn. The police arrive at the landing site and turn the body over only to find it is one of them, Detective Sergeant Jack Burns.

Luckily for the librarian not the victim, Roe has witnesses who saw her in plain sight when the corpse landed near her. Jack had disliked and distrusted Roe although she never knew why. She soon gets calls with the other person hanging up on her without a word and someone places a pink ribbon around the neck of her cat. Angel and Roe get into a fight with a librarian aide; soon after that woman is assaulted by a pipe and hospitalized. Another cop is in danger; her former lover Arthur Smith with both attending a dinner accompanied by their current significant others. Roe tries to put together the puzzle pieces based on the assumption that Angel is the object of an obsessed person, but feels she must determine the coherent picture before someone else is hurt or dead.

Charlaine Harris, renowned for her Stackhouse urban fantasies and her Harper Connelly mysteries, provides an engaging regional amateur sleuth cozy that is actually a reprint of a mid 1990s tale. The Teagarden mysteries are fun to read as they showcase the talented author’s earlier works. DEAD OVER HEELS is a fine entry as there seems to be no rationale reason from the incidents. Though not the best Teagarden whodunit, as the suspense never fully leaves the ground (pun intended), fans of the series will appreciate the heroine’s efforts to uncover the truth and her inner thoughts re her spouse and her bodyguard.

Harriet Klausner

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