Rainer Maria Rilke

"Live a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be repaid you a thousand and a thousand times, and however your life may turn,-it will, I am certain of it, run through the fabric of your growth as one of the most important threads among all the threads of your experiences, disappointments, and joys."--Rainer Maia Rilke


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Wednesday, May 9, 2012

A Living Death

Play Dead by Anne Frasier
(Adult Mystery)

This book takes place in Savannah and is there any more literary city in America?  To read this book made me feel the passion and heat and intensity of that Southern city almost as soon as I opened those pages.

In this cunning mystery, someone is kidnapping victims, torturing them and then dumping them, leaving them as if dead all over the city.  Except they're not quite dead.  Some of them wake up in the morgue after the pronouncement of death and officials soon realize the killer is giving the victims TTX, a poison that makes the victim appear as if dead while they can still see, hear and feel everything going on-a living death.

Heading up the investigation is Elise, a police detective, who was abandoned in a Savannah cemetery as a baby.  Local gossip suggests she is the illegitimate daughter of the "Voodoo King" and her 'devil eyes' seems to confirm the rumors.  While she is trying to come to grips with her past and this new killer, she is increasingly frustrated at the alienation of her own daughter.

On top of all that, she's also been saddled with an ex-FBI agent as her new partner.  David Gould moved to Savannah for a fresh start after a family tragedy but he is still haunted and grieving, just moments away from a breakdown.  It's up to this ill-matched duo to solve the crime of the city's century while everyone around them is just waiting for their inevitable failure.

I loved everything about this novel--the setting, the varied and interesting characters and a mystery that kept me guessing right up until the end which still managed to surprise me.  I love to discover new authors and Anne Frasier is now on my short list of 'to reads'!

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