I continue reading candy! The writing is better for most of the book. There are some very good descriptions, some are quite good & funny. Again, the wrap up wasn't as good as it could have been. Bad guy caught, tells all. I also seriously contemplated pulling a star from the book because the base mystery was so flawed. Still, it's candy & suspending my sense of belief for one item, though major, didn't seem quite fair. It was fun read. ( )

Aurora is back and is finally getting married. She hasn't known her prospective husband for very long and there are a lot of secrets she doesn't yet know about him. Still, she is in love and is willing to do what she can to make it work. As a wedding present he buys her the Julius House to keep her mystery solving hobby alive. The house is shrouded in mystery as one morning the families grandmother who was living above the garage came over to make breakfast for the father, mother and teenage daughter. They were missing but with their car in the garage and nothing stolen from the house. No bodies were ever found and it was a mystery to the police and local experts.

Roe quickly starts to decorate to her tastes and when her husbands friends arrive to live in the garage apartment, she enlists the help of Angel to help her measure the house looking for any clue as to what happened to the houses previous owners. It seems though that the house isn't her only problem when her new husbands past starts to catch up with them. Roe becomes the target of an axe man and it looks like if her husbands business associates won't kill her maybe the house will...

I really enjoyed this novel. It spent quite a lot of time with Roe and her personal life, but unlike the second book in the series A Bone to Pick, it didn't neglect the mystery aspects. There were lots of twists and turns, some of which could be predicted but others came from left field in the way of the best mysteries. I like Roe as a central character still and am interested to see what she gets up to next, both in her personal life and her mystery solving capacity. ( )

As one installment in a series of books this was an interesting read as yet again we learn a little more about Roe. But I found certain elements of this book, eg. Roe's reaction to Martin's big secret, less than authentic. The mystery was also intruiging but the solution to the mystery was quite pat. ( )

Hardly worth opening the book-the mystery was obvious from the beginning and Roe seems a bit out of sorts for the entire book. ( )

For the first 100 pages or so of The Julius House, Aurora Teagarden is too caught up in preparations for her wedding and her new life with Martin Bartell to worry about sleuthing. Roe travels to Ohio to surreptitiously buy the farm Martin grew up on as a wedding present; when she presents it to him, he presents her with the deed to the Julius House. She spends lots of time--and lots of money--fixing the house up. Then Martin presents her with another present: an assistant. Shelby Youngblood is an old army chum of Martin's, fallen on hard times, and he and his wife, Angel, will live in the mother-in-law apartment over the garage. Shelby will work at the plant for Martin, Angel will help Roe in whatever capacity she's needed.

There are actually two mysteries in this book: whatever happened to the Julius family, who all disappeared without a trace one morning, and what dark secret in Martin's past is preventing him from being fully present with Roe. How do the Youngbloods--who have many hidden talents between them--fit into it? Roe does an admirable job of solving both mysteries, although we're left up in the air at novel's end as to where the marriage will go.

Charlaine Harris' characters, even minor ones, are interesting and lively, and Lawrenceton, Georgia is as much a character as any human being. Her portrayal of small town Southern life--the quirks, the feuds, the nastiness that sometimes simmers and sometimes boils over violently--is spot-on...at least, it seems so to the reader, and isn't that one of the marks of effective writing?

A quick, charming read. ( )