The narrator, J J (“Jaye”) Graves, is from a family of morticians. She also is in that profession and is the fourth generation of morticians. She was a doctor but when her parents died, packed up her bags and retreated to the small town of Bloody Mary in Virginia to run Graves (Hm…) Funeral Home.
Since hardly anyone died there, she makes her ends meet by volunteering to be a coroner as well.
Fiona Murphy is dead at thirty and her abusive husband, George is the prime suspect He has already been arrested. Jaye is called to the crime scene, a ditch where Fiona’s body was found.
The person who found her was Johnny Duggan, the groundskeeper. Jack, Jaye’s close childhood friend was the chief of police.
He tells her that her car was near her body. She had gotten out of the car to talk to a guy who was in a big truck (who was the murderer). If she was running away from George, then this is not a likely scenario so as hard as it is to accept, George may not be the killer.
There is a writer, Brody, an attractive young man, who comes to Jaye for information for his murder story. He alternately seems very attractive as well as obstinate and annoying.
Jack is cutely jealous of Jaye’s attraction to Brody. They go to interview the psychiatrist that Fiona was seeing for a long time, and he is curiously reluctant to talk to Jack and Jaye. He, Dr Hides, is interviewed and they both get a very definite feeling that he is trying to hide some information (pun intended, of course).
Investigations, meanwhile, reveal that Fiona was into sex with violence and also was doing two other things that her husband George did not know. Probably into prostitution because she owned a Lexus that George knew nothing about and also she was having sex with Dr Hines, the psychiatrist, who was also into sadomasochistic sex.
Jaye herself is dying for sex and so jumps into bed readily with Brody.
Jack calls and says that there is another body, that of Amanda Wallace. Jaye goes there and finds her in a hotel room, less than twenty minutes drive from her own home, killed by strangulation and sexually assaulted. Clear conclusion that she was having an affair. (She was married and a mother of two).
Now Jack discovers that Amanda’s lover is Marcus Colburn, one of Jack’s own detectives, and the latter admits to meeting Amanda a the hotel but claims he had left earlier than the murder time. When they learn that Amanda was also seeing a psychiatrist, Jack and Jaye go to the house of Dr Hines with intent to arrest him. Only to find that he was hanging, dead, in his house.
When Brody announces his intent to leave, disappointment swells within Jaye. However, he says that he suspects Jack was the murderer of all three murders they were investigating!
And thinking back, Jaye cannot give him a solid alibi based on the time of those murders, which sends her into a panic. Could it be true?
But then she decides to trust her instincts and trust Jack. Why? Not based on solid evidence. Then she realizes that there was another person in all those places where the murder happened. Brody! In one place he was with her but had the opportunity to slip away for a critical period!
The killer turns out to be a surprise. That is good. What is not good is that there are hardly any clues along the way (at least to me there weren’t!) and he explains afterwards the killer gives justification for each murder. The other thing that rankles is that like a James Bond villain, the killer takes all the time in the world to describe each killing, including at least one thing Jaye had chalked up to an accident. But given that the killer is suddenly produced seemingly out of nowhere, I guess this was the only option to tie all the loose ends in the story. (Can you see me trying hard to avoid any spoilers?)
In spite of all this, I enjoyed this book because it takes itself very lightly and a thread of humour is running all the way through it. It is a kind of romantic mystery and what’s more, a lighthearted, humorous romantic mystery.
I am a sucker for these stories – you may not be!
I would say a 7/10
— Krishna
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