Wash and Die

I just finished Wash and Die by Barbara Colley. This is the seventh book in the series about New Orleans maid Charlotte LaRue.

Charlotte is a single mother of a grown son with a very close extended family. Her sister Madeline has a police detective daughter named Judith and a lawyer son named Daniel. Judith's ex-partner Louis lives in the other half of Charlotte's Victorian double.

Charlotte has a knack for being in the right place at the right time (or is that the wrong place at the wrong time?) to stumble on murder. And she's pretty good at solving the crimes too, which the local police tend to find aggravating.

In this episode Louis' ex-wife Joyce is back from rehab and looking to Charlotte for a place to stay. Of course Joyce being Joyce, mayhem, and murder, soon follows.

As usual Charlotte can't just let Judith and the police find the answers to the questions that follow which naturally puts Charlotte in harm's way.

Can Charlotte find her beloved parakeet, Sweety Boy? Can she find the killer before the killer finds her or anyone else gets hurt?

Ms. Colley has developed a great cast of characters who really care about each other with a heroine with dogged determination to find the answers to the riddles surrounding the murder in their midst in a series that gets better with each new book.

I would recommend reading the books in this series in order. They do stand alone although they refer back to the earlier books so reading them in order builds a good foundation for understanding references in the later books. And all of them are good so why not read them all?

The next book will be out in January 2010 and I for one am marking my calendar.

Jody