Bond’s charming new Carlotta Wren mystery (after 2006’s Body Movers
) has all the ingredients for a chic sleuth-a-thon, from identity theft and designer clothes to dead bodies and poker. Rich girl–turned–Neiman’s shop girl Carlotta was left at 18 to raise her 10-year-old brother, Wesley, after their parents, Randolph and Valerie, skipped town to avoid investment fraud charges. Ten years later, snarky Atlanta DA Kelvin Lucas has reopened the case. Grouchy love interest Det. Jack Terry wants information that Carlotta’s afraid to divulge. Randolph makes a mysterious call to Carlotta and also gets in touch with Peter Ashford, her attentive ex-fiancé. Wesley, an oddly likable slacker and compulsive gambler, believes in their dad’s innocence, but Carlotta’s not so sure. When a woman with Carlotta’s car and I.D. apparently kills herself, Lucas requests a fake funeral to lure her parents back. Bond keeps the pace frantic, the plot tight and the laughs light, and supplies a cliffhanger ending that’s a bargain at twice the price. (Aug.)
