Reunions Can Be Murder

A Charlie Parker Mystery

Octogenarian Willie McBride has gone missing, and now his obnoxious daughter is pestering Albuquerque CPA Charlie Parker to find him in time for the big family reunion. Apparently, the eccentric old man had one driving obsession: finding gold. So Charlie follows Willie's prospecting trail to the modern-day ghost town of White Oaks, site of an historic gold rush, a bitter scandal, some ugly business - and now a corpse.

The odd characters still lingering on here in White Oaks have a few tales to tell, and Charlie discovers Willie was looking to strike it rich by claiming a legendary fortune buried in the Lost Dutchman Mine. While determined to link Willie's path with her suspicions of illegal drug doings in the deserted town, she sets out across the searing desert toward the mountains, prepared for anything - except murder.

©2002 Connie Shelton (P)2004 Books in Motion

No suspense, minimal arc, annoying narrator

This would have made a good Weight Watcher's food diary: the author mentioned everything the protagonist (Charlie Parker) ate during the entire narrative. And where she drove and how long it took. She also left her dog in the car way too often.

The narrator is a practitioner of "upspeak," in which very few sentences ever end with a period; they end in question marks? Like the reader is reading to kindergarteners? I kept expecting her to point to the pictures and ask me to name the object?

I plan to avoid both the author AND the narrator in future purchases.