Review: A Dead Red Heart: Amusing, Fast Paced and a new favorite author
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 02 5, 2012
What an absolutely delightful novel this was. A Dead Red Heart is one of the books about the adventures of Eula Mae Bains, known to her family and friends as Lalla. A towering goddess of a woman, the former high profile model is now forty (oh dear Lord- forty!) and has settled in back home in Modesto, CA,  running her father's crop dusting business and working as one of the pilots. As the story opens, Lalla is in an alley, getting ready to give former Marine and now street person Billy Wayne a "Come To Jesus" lecture about the hundreds of love poems on cut out snow flakes that he left attached to her already highly visible vintage red Caddilac. When Lalla starts her tirade in the alley behind Mr. Kim's Vietnamese restaurant, Billy Wayne is not really responsive to her verbal onslaught. That's probably due to the scissors that are sticking out of his chest and the massive amount of blood hemorraghing from the wound. Before she knows it, she's a suspect in his murder, even though her boyfriend, Caleb is a deputy with the police department.Lalla is not a wallflower who will sit idly waiting for the police to clear her name, especially since her reputation is a bit tarnished by a different murder and arson that kind of fell into her path a year ago. Along with an extremely amusing cast of friends, associates and the usual suspects, Lalla works to solve her problem while being harassed by an anonymous hater, mooned over by an underaged college boy, irritated by her father who starts to date her third grade teacher, and positioned to take the fall for a few other crimes.The Dead Red Heart is more typical of a Southern girl's whodunit, even though it's set in CA. Even the secondary characters in this novel are lively, eccentric and very well developed. The plot moves at a brisk pace and even if you can figure out the denouement before the end, you'll want to keep reading, just for the pleasure of spending a little more time with Lalla and her cast of characters. How many others will die before she is exonerated? Will she accept Caleb's proposal despite her two amusingly failed previous marriages?Jump into that vintage cherry red Cadillac with Lalla Bains and enjoy the ride as the mystery of A Dead Red Heart runs its course. Like me, you'll want more from this new found friend.