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Megan Clark makes no bones about the fact that she's a magnet for dead bodies. She's tripped over enough of them to earn herself a reputation as a darned good amateur sleuth. She's also earned a bit of grief from the Amarillo, Texas, police, who wonder if Megan herself isn't killing off some of these people in a bid to gain attention from the press. Her current investigation, though, has nothing to do with a body -- at least, in the beginning. Megan is fascinated with a Depression-era jalopy that turned up in a drying lakebed during a particularly long drought. A librarian by trade, Megan has a doctorate degree in archeology and anthropology with a speciality in paleopathology. Old bones are her true love, but old cars will suffice when bones are scarce. She tries to draw the other members of her mystery discussion group at the Time and Again Bookstore into investigating the provenance of the car, but even her best friend Ryan Stevens wants nothing to do with this puzzle. Megan is angered by the lack of support from the Murder by the Yard reading group. Two new members especially upset her. Pearl Smith, aka Madame Jezebel, is a fortune-teller new to Amarillo. Maria Constantine is the wife of a police officer and a volunteer at a local hospital. While Pearl warns Megan that her snooping might land her in trouble, Maria eggs her on with gushing words of praise. Megan leaves the weekly meeting in a snit and almost immediately discovers a dead body in the alley behind the bookstore. One body leads to another as the story progresses. True to form, Megan insinuates herself into the investigation, much to the annoyance of Sergeant Schroder and Megan's former boyfriend, Lieutenant Jerry Carr. The seven members of the mystery discussion group also become involved when Megan assigns each of them a chore related to either the murders or the history of the jalopy. Convinced that the murders and the car are tied together in some way, Megan pursues her hunches despite police disapproval and the growing concern of Ryan Stevens. Readers will have to suspend all belief in the legal system, if not in reality itself, when they read this latest Murder by the Yard mystery by D R Meredith. The author takes the Cabot Cove syndrome and plays it for all it's worth, letting readers know right from the start that her heroine is more than a match for Jessica Fletcher when it comes to stumbling over dead bodies. Megan Clark prides herself on the number of murder victims she's found. Referring to the first corpse, she says, "Actually, it's body number seven -- plus two suicides and an assault with a deadly weapon." Not bad for a librarian who can't find a paying job in her real field of expertise. Actually, Megan is a bit of an egotistical whiner who doesn't always think before she acts. She also doesn't realize that Ryan Stevens, the widowed father of her best friend, is in love with her. Ryan is a bit of a strange character. He faints at the mere mention of blood, his longest faint having lasted 45 minutes. He plays Watson to Megan's Holmes, with several chapters given over to his first person musings on love, murder, and Miss Clark. The rest of the book is written in the third person except for a couple of first person chapters attributed to a nursing home resident. The book's plot is complicated enough to hold the reader's attention and the cast of characters is diverse. All in all, MURDER BY THE BOOK is a perfect beach book, a light and pleasant read that doesn't require overuse of one's little gray cells.
Reviewed by Mary V. Welk, July 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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