Sweet and Deadly [Mass Market Paperback]

Charlaine Harris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 6, 2007

Now best known for her New York Times bestselling Sookie Stackhouse novels, Charlaine Harris hit "a home run the first time out" (Birmingham News) with the story of a murder that embroils a small-town reporter in mystery that hits close to home...

Catherine Linton has returned to her hometown of Lowfield, Mississippi, unconvinced that the death of her parents in a car crash six months earlier was an accident. And her suspicions are confirmed when she stumbles upon the dead and beaten body of her doctor-father's longtime nurse. There are secrets being kept in Lowfield. And the town where Catherine grew up may be the same place where she is sent to her grave...

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Before the Southern Vampire series, Harris wrote more traditional mysteries. Sweet and Deadly, her first published book, has been brought back into print after nearly 30 years. Set in the small town of Lowfield, Mississippi, it is a gothic-influenced novel about a series of murders starting with the town doctor and his wife. Six months later, newspaper reporter Catherine, the daughter of the murdered couple, discovers a body at an abandoned cabin on the family land. At first, Catherine is the only one who believes that the new murder is connected to her parents’ death, but her eager fellow reporter, Tom, desperate for a big story, joins her investigation, and together they begin to uncover a plethora of small-town secrets. Taut, tense, and compelling, this stellar debut is a terrific small-town mystery. While Sookie fans may miss the vampires, they will be enchanted with tough, lonely Catherine and will find some similarities in the insular setting. --Jessica Moyer --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

Sweet and Deadly combines astute depiction of a Southern town with a crackling good mystery plot...Sweet and Deadly has a little of everything: rich regional authenticity, good dialogue, interesting characters instead of stereotypes, and taut suspense. The heroine is a self-sufficient woman who can shoot a gun and has true grit. The sheriff is a well-drawn character and so is the killer, whose motive will stun the reader. Charlaine Harris has a great future as a writer. -- Savannah News-Press

Sweet and Deadly is billed as 'a southern mystery,' and it does have that slow, sittin'-in-the-shade quality as it lazily rolls to a shocker ending. -- The Des Moines Register

As much novel as mystery as it explores the complex character and secrets of a small Southern town. -- Wichita Eagle-Beacon

Charlaine Harris is a name to remember, not only because she has written an engrossing first novel about multiple murders but also because she has set that mystery in a small Southern town that Southern readers will find familiar and credible. -- The Macon Telegraph & News

Engaging. Harris's style has a charm and ease that remind one of Anne Tyler...original and surprising. Traces of Gothic romance add to the book's unusual flavor. -- The Christian Science Monitor

Harris writes neatly and with assurance, and she avoids the goo that makes equivalent books so sticky. -- The New York Times Book Review

Introducing an author of rare talents, this mystery is set in a small town on the Mississippi Delta that Harris makes excitingly real...Harris artfully keeps the mask on the killer until the stunning conclusion. -- Publishers Weekly

Packs a perennial punch. It offers a rarity in popular fiction: an unromanticized portrait of a Southern Girl. -- Philadelphia Inquirer

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Mass Market Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Berkley (March 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0425214621
• ISBN-13: 978-0425214626
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (50 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #56,339 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Charlaine Harris (born November 25, 1951 in Tunica, Mississippi) is a New York Times bestselling author who has been writing for over twenty years. She was raised in the Mississippi River Delta area. Though her early works consisted largely of poems about ghosts and, later, teenage angst, she wrote plays when she attended Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. She began to write books a few years later.
After publishing two stand-alone mysteries, Harris launched a lighthearted series "starring" Georgia librarian Aurora Teagarden, with Real Murders, a Best Novel nominee for the 1990 Agatha Awards. Harris wrote eight Aurora titles. In 1996, she released the first of the much darker Shakespeare mysteries, featuring the amateur sleuth Lily Bard, a karate student who makes her living cleaning houses. Shakespeare's Counselor, the fifth--and last-- was printed in fall 2001.
After Shakespeare, Harris created The Sookie Stackhouse urban fantasy series about a telepathic waitress who works in a bar in the fictional Northern Louisiana town of Bon Temps. The first of these, Dead Until Dark, won the Anthony Award for Best Paperback Mystery in 2001. Each book follows Sookie as she tries to solve mysteries involving vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures. The series, which now numbers nine titles, has been released worldwide.
Sookie Stackhouse proved to be so popular that Alan Ball, creator of Six Feet Under, announced he would undertake the production of a new show for HBO based upon the books. He wrote and directed the pilot episode for that series, True Blood, which premiered in September of 2008. It was an instant success and was quickly picked up for a second season.
In October 2005, Harris's new mystery series about a young woman named Harper Connelly debuted with the release of Grave Sight. Harper has the ability to determine the cause of death of any body. There are now three Harper titles (GRAVE SIGHT, GRAVE SURPRISE, AN ICE COLD GRAVE) with a 4th (GRAVE SECRET) to be released in 2009.
Harris has also co-edited three very popular anthologies with her friend Toni L.P. Kelner. The anthologies feature stories with an element of the supernatural, and the submissions come from a rare mixture of mystery and urban fantasy writers.
Professionally, Harris is a member of the Mystery Writers of America and the American Crime Writers League. She is a member of the board of Sisters in Crime, and alternates with Joan Hess as president of the Arkansas Mystery Writers Alliance. Personally, Harris is married and the mother of three. She lives in a small town in Southern Arkansas and when she is not writing her own books, she reads omnivorously!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

140 of 143 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Left me unsatisfied, March 13, 2007

By 

K. Gilligan "grad student & literature lover" (Haddon Heights, NJ) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sweet and Deadly (Mass Market Paperback)

Charlaine Harris is my favorite author, so when I found out they were rereleasing the hard to find "Sweet and Deadly" I ordered it immediately.

Having been spoiled by fantastic characters such as Lily Bard, Aurora Teagarden, and Sookie Stackhouse, it was hard to really like Catherine Linton. Perhaps if this had been any other author, I would have been satisfied, but I expected more from Charlaine Harris. I do keep in mind that this was one of her first books, and her writing has grown in leaps and bounds since this was published. I think my biggest problem was that the ending seemed rushed to me, as if Catherine realized she only had a few more pages left to solve the mystery!

If you're new to Charlaine Harris, I'd skip this one. If you'd like to read some great novels by Charlaine Harris, (and I recommend you do!) try the Aurora Teagarden mysteries. (Real Murders: An Aurora Teagarden Mystery, Bk. 1, A Bone To Pick: An Aurora Teagarden Mystery, Book 2, Three Bedrooms, One Corpse: An Aurora Teagarden Mystery, The Julius House: An Aurora Teagarden Mystery, Bk. 4, Dead Over Heels: An Aurora Teagarden Mystery, Bk. 5, Fool And His Honey: An Aurora Teagarden Mystery, Bk. 6, Last Scene Alive (Aurora Teagarden Mysteries), and Poppy Done To Death: An Aurora Teagarden Mystery, Bk. 8.)

Or if you'd like to try a different series by Charlaine Harris, check out the Lily Bard mysteries.(Shakespeare's Landlord (The First Lily Bard Mystery), "Shakespeare's Champion", Shakespeare's Christmas", "Shakespeare's Trollop", and Shakespeare's Counselor")

Or her new supernatural Southern Vampire Mysteries featuring telepath Sookie Stackhouse (Dead Until Dark (Southern Vampire Mysteries, Bk. 1), "Living Dead in Dallas", "Club Dead", "Dead to the World", "Dead as a Doornail", "Definitely Dead", and "All Together Dead")

98 of 100 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good, But Not Great..., August 19, 2003

By 

Silmarwen (Huntington Beach, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: SWEET + DEADLY (Hardcover)

Catherine Linton set out early in the morning to go and shoot some cans for target practice. After deciding that the last can deserved to live (having missed it several times), Catherine spotted the hand. It was reaching out towards her from the doorway of an old, rickety shack of a house that hadn't been lived in for years. Catherine took one look at the woman's misshapen head and knew that there was nothing she could do for her. When Sheriff Galton came out to take a look, he thought it was pretty weird that Catherine didn't mention that the body belonged to Leona, her father's nurse for several years. Catherine tried to persuade the Sheriff that she just didn't look at the face, but she knew that she was still a suspect.

Catherine wasn't too happy that Leona had died, but she and Leona had never really liked each other so she wouldn't exactly miss her. She did miss her parents. She missed them a lot. They had been killed in a freak car accident 6 months previous and the whole town was still reeling from the shock of losing the beloved small-town doctor who had served the community so valiantly for so long. Ever since Catherine moved back to her hometown, she had felt isolated and alone from the people there. Now that she was suddenly involved in something again, Catherine started to live once more. She saw Randall, her editor at the Lowfield Gazette, for what felt like the first time and she had to say that she liked what she saw. To Catherine's surprise, Randall is not the only stranger who reaches out with offers of assistance - even the black community seemed to reach out to help her. Now, if only Catherine could put the clues together, she could solve the mystery of who killed her parents and Leona - and stop him before he killed again...

I enjoyed the book. I thought that the mystery was well developed and had a nice pacing to it. All of the characters were sketched out quickly, but it was easy for the reader to remember who was who. The setting was marvelous - you really could feel the heat coming off of the pavement in a small, still segregated town in the South. Harris' descriptions of the town and the people had to be my favorite part. However, my one complaint with the book is that I felt like a spectator looking in instead of identifying with any of the characters. I didn't have any emotional attachment to any of the characters and I really missed that because I immediately identified with Harris' characters in her Shakespeare, Southern Vampire and Teagarden series, but not here. If the book wasn't so hard to find and so dang expensive I would say that you should read it, but I have to say (since it is hard to find and it is extremely expensive) that you should read it if you find it, but don't kill yourself looking for it...

37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sweet and deadly is tart, taut and suspenseful, November 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Sweet and Deadly (Mass Market Paperback)

Catherine Linton drives out to shoot at tin cans one hot summer day. The peace and quiet is shattered by Catherine's discovery of a body, hideously fly coated. When Catherine reports her discovery to the sheriff she is offended that he suspects her because the woman was the late Dr. Linton's (Catherine's father's) nurse. This novel establishes a strong sense of place, a small southern town slowly experiencing transition after the Civil Rights movement. Each character, even minor ones, is briefly sketched but realistically developed: the town's first black librarian, the sheriff whose son is dealing pot, the black deputy, her employer's matchmaking mother etc. This is a gem of a mysery novel- one feels the heat, the beauty of the south, and the rising sense of danger that builds to one of the most suspenseful and exciting climaxes I have ever read. Sweet and deadly is one of the best mystery novels I have ever read. What I find a mystery is why it was never made into a film and why such a superb novel is out of print!