Book Review: On Spine of Death by Tamara Berry (By the Book Mysteries #2)

Stars: 5 out of 5

Pros: Characters, plots, laughs

Cons: One plot point seemed off

The Bottom Line:

Old bones in basement

Reheat a very cold case

Wacky, twisty fun

Bones Under the Floorboard

One of the unexpected surprises in my reading last year was the first in the By the Book Mysteries from Tamara Berry.  Naturally, that meant I rushed out and bought On Spine of Death, and then let it sit for a few months on my to be read pile.  But, with the third due out at the end of next month, I decided it was time to go back.  I found the second just as delightful as the first.

In the first book, we met bestselling thriller writer Tess Harrow and her teenage daughter, Gertrude.  They’d taken what was supposed to be a short trip to the small town of Winthrop, Washington, to stay in a remote cabin that Tess had just inherited from her grandfather.  However, they wound up falling in love with the area and deciding to move there permanently.

It’s now about nine months later, and Tess is working on turning her grandfather’s old hardware store into a bookstore.  That requires quite a bit of renovation.  In the process, two sets of bones are dislodged and fall directly into the basement.

The bones are identified as two women who went missing in the area, decades apart.  Tess is worried that their discovery will lead people to think that her grandfather had something to do with their disappearance.  Can she figure out what happened with these former cold cases?

Honestly, this just scratches the surface of the book.  There is a whole lot more going on than I touched on in my teaser.  Trust me, I wasn’t bored, but I was turning pages as quickly as I could to see what was happening.  There was one plot point in the middle of the book that I thought stretched credibility (even for this series), but it was minor.  There were some very creative twists, and they all made sense by the end.  In fact, I was impressed with how the climax brought everything together.

As I hinted at above, this series is wacky.  Oh, don’t worry, it all seems logical in the world that the series is building, but wacky is really the only word to describe it.  Needless to say, I laughed many times as I was reading, especially at some of the witty dialogue in the book.  The jokes did slow down as we entered the second half of the book, but it was a gradual transition that worked as we got into more serious territory.

What really helps hold this all together are the characters.  Again, they are a little odd, even for a cozy, but they feel real as we are reading.  We care for them and want to see them succeed.

While I will always recommend reading a series in order, I was very impressed with how the author danced around some things from the first book without spoiling anything.

I turned the final page thrilled that the next book is coming soon.  I can’t wait to see what happens next to Tess and the rest of the characters.  If you are in the mood for something light, fun, and twisty, you’ll be happy you picked up On Spine of Death.