Charlaine Harris, Sweet and Deadly

Sweet and Deadly

Charlaine Harris

Berkley, March 2007, $7.99, 304 pp.

ISBN 0425214621

It has been six months since her parents died in a car crash and Catherine Linton has returned to Lowfield, Mississippi in the hopes that familiar surroundings will help her healing process along. She is angry because her parents were murdered when their car breaks were deliberately loosened and she wants vengeance for their deaths. She also knows in her heart that the culprit is someone from Lowfield responsible because her parents never locked their car or garage.

One day while target shooting at the run down tenant house on her land, she sees the bloody body of a woman who is later identified as Leona Galles, who was her father's nurse more than three decades ago. The sheriff discovers evidence that she was a blackmailer but treats her homicide as a separate incident that isn't connected to the deaths of Catherine's parents. When a reporter dies while investigating the homicides, Catherine believes the same person killed all four people and in a dangerous moment sets out to prove it.

Long before Charlene Harris wrote the Sookie Stackhouse tales, she wrote this mystery and it shows the talent that in future years will make her a superstar. Readers get a picture of living in a small town in the Deep South in the 1950s when everyone knows their neighbors and murder is an aberration. Even a quarter a century ago, Ms. Harris was a genius at creating characters who are easy to understand and of course the identity of the villain comes as quite a shock. This is a thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining southern gothic mystery.

Harriet Klausner