Review: REAL MURDERS

Real Murders by Charlaine Harris
Book 1 of the Aurora Teagarden mysteries
Read by Therese Plummer
Format: audiobook
Genre: murder mystery

About Real Murders:

Though a small town at heart, Lawrenceton, Georgia, has its dark side-and crime buffs. One of whom is librarian Aurora "Roe" Teagarden, a member of the Real Murders Club, which meets once a month to analyze famous cases. It's a harmless pastime-until the night she finds a member killed in a manner that eerily resembles the crime the club was about to discuss. And as other brutal "copycat" killings follow, Roe will have to uncover the person behind the terrifying game, one that casts all the members of Real Murders, herself included, as prime suspects-or potential victims.

Source: Info in the About Real Murders was taken from GoodReads at http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/140091.Real_Murders on 15/02/2012.

Review:

I am obviously a Charlaine Harris fan and so I picked this book up when I saw it at the Library even though this is not of my genre. I already know that Charlaine Harris is a talented story teller. She has a magical way of telling a story which is addictive, even though I get exasperated with a main protagonist who is too stupid to live (TSTL). Having said that, it seems to me that this earlier work of hers is not the same. I mean the main characters are not TSTL! Roe, our heroine, is a librarian with her head screwed on right. She's not stupid at all! Which made me wonder what happened to subsequent serieses Charlaine Harris wrote which toted a TSTL heroine... I couldn't quite wrap my head around that... the concept that a writer got worse instead of better in her writing career... Roe here is such a sensible girl that I couldn't quite understand why Charlaine Harris would make Sookie Stackhouse a TSTL. (Sookie Stackhouse is Charlaine Harris's urban fantasy series, for those of you not familiar with the other works of this author.) The idea of it is quite baffling to me... Anyway, like I said, the story telling quality is magical and addictive. Though I have to say that it feels like it was not as compelling as it was with the Sookie Stackhouse series and Harper Connellly series. However, I put that down to the genre. I simply like urban fantasy more than fiction murder. So I imagine that for those mystery suspense readers, this series might feel like the story telling quality is more compelling than that of the Sookie Stackhouse series and Harper Connellly series. I believe that this slight decrease in the compelling quality of the story telling is a reader discrepancy rather than the actual quality in the story telling. At the end of it, I enjoyed this book so much that I was mighty glad that I have the subsequent books in this series borrowed from the library already!

Empirical Evaluation:
Story telling quality = 5
Character development = 5
Story itself = 4
Ending = 4
World building = 4
Cover art = 1
Pace = N/A (6.25-hour listening time)
Plot = 4
Narrator = 4.5

Overall Rating: 4.5 out of 5 cherries

Thank you to the RCT Library for letting me borrow this audiobook!!

FTC Disclosure:
This audiobook was borrowed from the library. No money received for this review.