An ingenious plot and sufficient flow of blood keep the pages flying in Harris's ( Sweet and Deadly ) third novel, as a series of killings patterned after celebrated murders is perpetrated on the small community of Lawrenceton, Ga. Twenty-eight-year-old Aurora (Roe) Teagarden, professional librarian, belongs to the Real Murders club, a group of 12 enthusiasts who gather monthly to study famous baffling or unsolved crimes. As a meeting is to begin, Roe discovers the massacred body of a club member. She recognizes the method of slaughter as imitating the very crime she was to address that night--suddenly her life as armchair sleuth assumes an eerie reality. The murderer continues to claim victims, each in the style of a different historical killer. Roe herself becomes a target, and also attracts two admirers, Robin Crusoe, a famed mystery writer new to Lawrenceton, and club member/detective Arthur Smith. Death seems to have infused new life into her waning social calendar, an irony not lost on this pensive character. Harris draws the guilty and the innocent into an engrossing tale while inventing a heroine as capable and potentially complex as P. D. James's Cordelia Gray. (Dec.)
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Charlaine Harris is as charming and warm in person as her writing is. A few weeks back, I was able to sit with her for a few minutes at the RT Booklovers Convention in Dallas, where she was celebrating the release of Day Shift, the second novel in her Midnight […]
It’s been a year since Charlaine Harris concluded her phenomenally popular Southern Vampire (aka, Sookie Stackhouse) saga. It was a wild ride, encompassing 13 best-selling novels over a 12-year period, an HBO series, and millions of Bon Temps, Louisiana, fanatics. So what’s next for Harris? Something even better. In May, she will release the first book […]
