Sleep like a baby by Charlaine Harris
The ninth Aurora Teagarden mystery starts with Roe having her baby and then jumps ahead two months. Roe and Robin (and Roe’s younger half-brother Philip) are adjusting to being a family that contains a tiny human. Overall, things are going well, though Roe still has to decide whether she’s going back to work at the library as her maternity leave is over (to tell the truth, when this came up for discussion in the book I realised I had forgotten that Roe ever worked in a library, as it comes up so rarely in the latter books).
Then Roe gets the flu. This would not ordinarily be a big problem, as Robin works from home and is a very supportive Dad, but Robin is going to Bouchercon, the world mystery convention and as he has been nominated for the Anthony Award Roe really wants him to go (Bouchercon and the Anthony are both, I was surprised to learn, real. The convention appears to be the mystery-lovers’ equivalent of SF’s Worldcon, even taking place in a different city each year. In the book it is taking place in Nashville, and as far as I can tell it never has done so in the real world). Fortunately, when Roe was recently out of the hospital they had a caretaker come in and work part-time helping to take care of the baby and the woman, Virginia, is available to come again and stay nights. Roe can still feed the baby, as long as she is careful to wear a mask.
Everything seems to be going well, until the stormy night when Roe, now starting to recover, awakens to find the baby monitor in her room, the baby fussing, Virginia missing, and a dead woman in the back yard. The dead woman is not Virginia, but rather turns out to be a former stalker of Robin, a woman who tried to kill Roe some time ago. A neighbour claims to have seen a man resembling Robin skulking around the back yard that night. Fortunately, Robin has an impeccable alibi . . . doesn’t he?
Extra complications range from the major (Roe’s mother’s new husband having a heart attack; a shooting at the hospital) to the minor (Roe’s diaper bag, with her driver’s license inside, is stolen at the hospital. Robin’s keys and an old sweater that he wears when writing both go missing. That sort of thing).
So there are two mysteries: what happened to Virginia? And who (and how) killed the Stalker? Roe solves the second, but the solution to the first kind of comes out of nowhere. Given it’s book nine, and half the mystery isn’t so much solved as discovered, this can’t go above mildly recommended for the average reader — but recommended for those who are already fans of the series.
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