I’m loving these two contemporary murder mystery series I’m following. I don’t look forward to the day I can only await the next book rather than my present glom of Griffiths’s Ruth Galloway mysteries and Wendy Roberts’s Bodies of Evidence. I finished #2, A Grave Search, today. The Roberts series, unlike Griffiths’s, has a healthy dose of an ongoing romance, which I’m especially enjoying.
Roberts’s heroine, Julie Hall, aka Delma Arsenault, has the power to find dead bodies with dowsing, or divining rods. In book #1, Julie’s supernatural abilities took her into the dark heart of her childhood and ended on a note of high, painful drama. Book #2 sees further resolution to the drama, but also greater peace and yes, even happiness, for Julie-Delma. In Book #1, her romance with older-man and FBI agent, Garrett Pierce, had the desperation of two unhappy, tragic people finding solace in each other. But Book #2 finds Julie and Garrett with an ironed-out relationship, still sexy and bantery, still an overprotective Garrett to a where-angels-fear-to-tread Julie, but they feel like a solid couple, past the first throes of getting to know each other (though the sexy still burns bright). Continue reading
With an ARC of Wendy Roberts’s Bodies of Evidence #4 waiting in the wings, I went to the first because I cannot bear coming to a series midway. Besides, I like two of the series’ premises: a heroine with divining powers and a May-to-December romance (her twenty-five to his forty-five). From the get-go, Roberts’s heroine, Julie Hall, aka Delma Arsenault, is a mess, but a likeable one. She lives with her Rottweiler, Wookie, in an old trailer on her grandfather’s property . She works at the local gas station, plays with her dog, takes care of Gramps, and fights off the urge to drink. Julie is a woman with dark, difficult memories of abandonment (by her mother) and physical abuse by her grandmother. Despite this, she is neither lugubrious, or weepy. I liked her for that: she’s darkly funny, caring, even loving, but rough around the edges and her mouth makes a sailor blush. She also carries an unlikely ability: to locate the missing dead with the use of divining rods, or as they’re called in the novel, dowsing rods. Into Julie’s work-home-walk-dog life walks FBI Agent Garrett Pierce, on the trail of a serial killer. He wants Julie’s help to find the missing girls, to recover their bodies, to bring him closer to catching the killer. 