Sleep Like a Baby

Robin and Roe are new parents. Their newborn daughter, Sophie, is proving to be a handful, Roe’s mother helps by paying for Virginia Mitchell, to come to their rescue for the first few weeks. Virginia is accommodating and steps in when Robin has to go out of town for work. Too bad she goes missing, and a dead body is found in the backyard.

Roe doesn’t want to worry Robin, so she keeps the fact that she is suffering from a severe case of the flu. A couple of nights after Robin leaves Roe wakes to hear her daughter crying, and Virginia is nowhere to be found. Roe and her brother. Philip searches the house and the backyard. What they find is a dead woman, but it isn’t Virginia. She doesn’t recognize the mystery woman and doesn’t know what happened to Virginia. Is she alive, or like the unknown woman in the backyard, is her body out there waiting to be found?

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Series: An Aurora Teagarden Mystery – Book #10
Author: Charlaine Harris
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Publisher: Minotaur Books

Rating:

In Sleep Like a Baby, the latest installment of the #1 New York Times Best-selling Charlaine Harris’s Aurora Teagarden series, Roe is a new mom with a dead woman in her backyard. She is sick and has a missing babysitter as well. Are the two events related or just coincidence? It is up to Roe to find out and quickly. The dead woman is ultimately revealed as Robin’s stalker and a woman who had tried to kill Roe in the past.

This is a heartwarming story of relationships, adventures in childcare, and murder. The characters are well developed and have endearing personalities. Roe is a typical new mother, exhausted and proud, as well as worried. Readers with young children or new parents will have no problem relating to Roe and everything she is going through.

The murder investigation is not as detailed as some readers may like, and in truth would not be very realistic. Having one of the lead detectives in the investigation as an old friend of the main character is a scenario that would, in real life, rarely, if ever, occur. A true detective would excuse himself from the investigation as being biased. However, this aside, the characters are beautifully written with just the right amount of eccentricities to make them believable.

Ms. Harris has a smooth, natural writing style and can tell a story. The book was not as fast-paced as others in the series and got bogged down with all the new baby and relationship issues. Unfortunately, the story seemed more about the new parents, their recent marriage, and Roe’s brother than about the murder and the victim. The main character, Roe, did little to no investigation. The solution and unveiling of the killer were more of an accident than any real clues.

Sleep Like a Baby is a good story if the reader likes personal issues involved in their mysteries more than evidence or suspects and is interspersed with a family dynamic.