Booby Trap

February 1, 2009
A recently married paralegal from Southern California, Odelia Grey describes herself as a short, two-hundred plus, cranky, middle-aged woman with medium brown hair and freckles. She is also the head of Reality Check, a group that offers advice and support to anyone who feels they dont fit into what society considers normal. In this fourth novel in the series, Jaffarian returns to the theme of her first mysteryfoul play tied to sexually oriented online chat rooms. One of Odelias friends thinks she has chatted online with the serial killer known as the Blond Bomber and wants Odelia to check out her suspicions. Oh, and by the way, the suspect is the womans own son, plastic surgeon Dr. Brian Eddy. The novel jumps between charming scenes portraying the everyday life of the Reality Check friends and over-the-top descriptions of online sex chatters. Fans who enjoyed earlier volumes, in which Odelias keen legal mind drove the mystery, may be less pleased with this second excursion into unsavory online sex. The cast of supporting charactersis definitely worthy of more serious development in forthcoming books.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)

December 8, 2008
In Jaffarian's bodacious fourth mystery to feature bighearted, plus-sized Odelia Grey (after 2008's Thugs and Kisses
), Odelia's distraught friend, Lillian Ramsey, asks the paralegal's help in proving her famous cosmetic surgeon son, Brian Eddy, is not the Blond Bomber, a serial killer who for the past year has been plaguing Southern California. Odelia—with the aid of her wheelchair-bound husband, Greg Stevens, and the cooperation of her attorney boss, Mike Steele—discovers that both Brian and his celebrity interior designer wife, Jane Sharp, appear to be connected to the four female victims, each of whom had the word whore
printed on her torso. The neatly constructed plot begins zigzagging around tough guy Gordon Harper, whose ex-wife, ex-stripper Crystal Lee, was one of the Bomber's victims. Leavened with lively humor, the action builds to a wickedly satisfying windup.