Deceased and Desist (A Tallie Graver Mystery #3)

Author:  Misty Simon
Genre:   Mystery

Mass Market Paperback; Digital Book
ISBN #:  9781496712257
Kensington Publishing
259 Pages
$7.99; $6.15 Amazon
November 7, 2018

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Most housecleaners don't do windows, but Tallie Graver loves leaving a pane of glass streak-free and sparkling.  After a dirty divorce from a filthy-rich jerk, she's started her own cleaning business to make ends meet.  On her latest job, prepping a renovated bed and breakfast for a grand re-opening, she's standing outside on a ladder, wiping off a grimy pane, when she spies a man on a bed through the glass.  But the B&B isn't open for business yet - and the man's not sleeping.  Her family owns the Graver Funeral Home, so Tallie knows a corpse when she sees one.

The victim is a shady building inspector with a reputation for handing out passing grades for a greased palm.  With the local police resistant, Tallie launches her own investigation, before she gets a rep as the town crank.  But it's going to take more than a squirt bottle and a squeegee to clean up this mess.  With the help of her gal pal Gina, Tallie searches for a killer's motive.  But she'd better be careful, or it'll be curtains for this window cleaner...

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Tallie Graver divorced her wealthy husband and left her old life behind to move back home.  She lives above her parents' mortuary, where she also works part-time, but the job she loves doing is cleaning homes - sometimes for the people she used to socialize with.  While cleaning windows for a local inn, she looks in one of them and sees a dead man.  She knows he must have been murdered, because his head was cocked at an unnatural angle.  But since her sometimes-friend Police Chief Burton has been out of commission due to an accident, she now has to deal with Detective Hammond, an unlikable man from another precinct who is taking over for awhile.  

Detective Hammond dislikes Tallie on sight, and seems to know an awful lot about her even though they've never met.  He tells her it was a heart attack, and she doesn't believe him, nor does anyone else -- except her best friend Gina.  When Tallie decides to look into the murder - as she's convinced it was one - she finds out that the man was an unscrupulous home inspector who was into more than inspecting homes.  And with support from an unlikely and surprising source, Tallie and Gina are on the tail of a killer.  Now if Tallie can just stay alive long enough to find out who it is...

This is the third book in the series, and I must say that I really enjoyed it.  Tallie is coming more into her own in this book, and not whining about what could have been.  She's happy in her job, has a new boyfriend that she's falling in love with, and even though she's not rich, she's doing what she wants, and that counts for a lot.  Unfortunately, her father wants her to quit cleaning houses and come to work at the mortuary full time, which is causing a tad bit stress as she tries to put off coming to a decision in that quarter.

When she starts digging, she comes in contact with the dead man's secretary, who seems to be hiding things of her own, and may know more than she's telling.  Tallie and Gina - who's also having problems on her own end - refuse to stop looking, and therefore come into close contact again with Hammond, who unreasonably (as Tallie believes) hates her.  But then Tallie begins to wonder why that's so, and how he knows everything about her.

What ensues is a very nice mystery that soon turns into more than that, and while Tallie doesn't walk into dangerous situations, sometimes things just seem to find her to cause more problems.  But there are a few turns, and more than a few surprises, to bring us to the motive for murder and how we may have been off the mark just a little in that area.  At any rate, when the ending comes, it was worth the read and I plan to continue with this series.  Recommended.

https://www.amazon.com/Deceased-Desist-Tallie-Graver-Mystery/dp/1496712250/ref

Goodreads:  https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3462910980

More on Misty Simon's Books:  https://www.fantasticfiction.com/s/misty-simon/