BODY OF EVIDENCE

Author: Stella Cameron ISBN: 0778322785 3/2006 SUSPENSE Publisher: MIRA

Emma Lachance is taken by surprise when she runs into her old flame, Finn Duhon, at a construction site in Pointe Judah, Louisiana. But the last thing she expects to find is the corpse of her friend, a local journalist whose relentlessly scathing articles have enraged every lawmaker and opportunist in town, including the mayor—Emma's husband. When more bodies are found, Emma and Finn wonder if the link is Secrets, an eclectic support group for women in which all the murder victims were members. A groups that has helped Emma find the strength to divorce her abusive, unfaithful husband. Could an innocent women's club drive a furious husband or boyfriend to murder, or are the killings only made to look as if that's the connection? Emma and Finn intend to find out—before Emma becomes the next body of evidence . . .

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

With divorce on her mind, poverty threatening, and a shop to run, Emma Lachance doesn't need the distraction of a hot ex-Army Ranger she went to high school with reappearing in her small Louisiana town. She really doesn't need to see the dead body of a good friend fall out of a portable toilet on a construction site as she's jogging by. But that's what has happened, and now she has to deal with the consequences.

Finn Duhon can't keep his mind or his hands off the luscious wife of Pointe Judah's smarmy, crooked mayor, except maybe when he's having nightmares about the horrors he experienced during his military service.

There's a lot going on beneath the surface of this small town, and Emma and Finn's romance is only a part of it. Who killed Finn's father? Who is Emma's husband having an affair with? And who is killing women?

The answers will rock Emma's world. Stella Cameron ties up her plot neatly in the end, but in a novel that is more than four hundred pages, there is plenty of room to meander. The book starts slowly, but gathers momentum by the middle.

BODY OF EVIDENCE is steamy romantic suspense in Cameron's patented style.

Heather Hiestand