Where the Bodies Are Buried

There is a familiar ring to the Bates food manufacturing company. Could it be another LBO company deep in the heart of Oakland that Jeri Howard finds so familiar? An excellent book full of Bay Area flavor -- which is what draws me to Dawson's books. She's a wonderful, entertaining writer and you find yourself right beside her in the produce district sleuthing for clues.

THE PLOT Private Investigator Jeri Howard is back and she's lost a client. Rob Lawter comes to Jeri and retains her services, tells her he'll brief her later, but he takes a header out of his apartment window -- suicide, accident or murder? Jeri investigates and takes a job as a legal secretary (her previous employment) at the company where Rob worked as a paralegal. All she has is a determination to help her now-dead client and an anonymous threatening note he received warning him about "blowing the whistle". Lots of people enter, stage left, and most of them stick around for the duration making it hard for Jeri to pin them down.Was it one of the lawyers? Was it the corporate bigwigs who took over the company in a hostile takeover and are they going to take the company apart piece-by-piece? Was it the plant managers conspiring to hide some terrible secret? Was it the brother-in-law who is trying to convince everyone that Rob committed suicide? And what do Rob's neighbours know about what happened that night? WHAT I LIKED There are no super-human powers of deduction shown here by Jeri. She is a plodder -- one piece of the puzzle at a time, turning it around and around to see if it fits anywhere. And a lot of the time, she doesn't know what to do with the pieces and doesn't try to make them fit anywhere. The writing is up to Dawson's normal first-rate level and it is particularly interesting to see how Jeri goes about her non-investigating tasks around the office. The office, and the office politics, are made real by describing Jeri's experiences -- all of them, including the rules for working the photocopier. They set the tone for the workplace and most writers would have left them out. Dawson includes them, and the story is better for having them.WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE Jeri can be a bit of a dunce at times. Several "clues" leap off the page at the reader, but Jeri misses them, or rather, completely misses the significance -- at the time. There are a couple like that, so quite often the reader knows where the story is going when Jeri doesn't, and it is only to the credit of Dawson's writing that you don't say "Hurry up and get there already." Secondly, at the end, Dawson doesn't play fair -- there are two "clues" that turn everything around for Jeri, the final pieces of the puzzle, and she doesn't show them to the reader. "Foul!", I cry.OVERALL RATING There is nothing overly exciting about the book, but it is a decent entertaining mystery, and the descriptions of the office raise it up a notch. The fouls at the end lower it a bit, so an overall 3.5 out of 5.0. Wouldn't want to buy it in hardcover, but it would be worth a paperback purchase.

Though he gives her a retainer to hire Oakland private investigator Jeri Howard, Rob Lawter tells the sleuth to wait until he gives her more details before she begins working for him. However, he did show her a threatening note and that he planned to blow the whistle on Bates Inc., the food processing firm he works for as a paralegal. Before he can tell her what he wants her to do, Rob apparently jumps to his death form a fifth story window.Since Jeri cashed his check, she feels she owes her now deceased client his money's worth. She takes an undercover job in the legal department of Bates where she hopes to quickly ferret out the identity of killer. Unbeknownst to the detective is what is lurking in the background, something that will turn out to be a more menacing threat to society.WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED is a frightening Bay Area who-done-it because the story line reads so genuine that consumers will be leery to eat or drink anything processed; diets will boom across America. Jeri is a wonderful female sleuth and the San Francisco-Oakland area is always a pleasant place to visit. In her seventh Howard mystery, award winning author Janet Dawson has written her best novel in what is already a top quality series.Harriet Klausner