A Bone to Pick

Librarian Aurora Teagarden reckons she knows everything about her fellow townsfolk, including which ones share her interest in the darker side of human nature, as she and her friends have formed a club to discuss real life killings. But fiction soon becomes fact as more and more bodies are discovered, and the similarities between prior murders and those of Aurora's fellow townsfolk become frighteningly common.

When cleaning lady and karate student Lily Bard discovers the dead body of her landlord, her plan of leading a quiet life becomes complicated. Accused of murder, she realizes that finding the true killer may be the only way to prove her innocence. Using the easy access her job gives her, Lily investigates the people of tiny Shakespeare, uncovering skeletons in closets, and ultimately, the killer...

Welcome to Midnight, Texas, a town with many boarded-up windows and few full-time inhabitants, located at the crossing of Witch Light Road and Davy Road. It's a pretty standard dried-up western town. There's a pawnshop (someone lives in the basement and is seen only at night). There's a diner (people who are just passing through tend not to linger). And there's new resident Manfred Bernardo, who thinks he's found the perfect place to work in private (and who has secrets of his own). Stop at the one traffic light in town, and everything looks normal. Stay awhile, and learn the truth....

Sookie Stackhouse is a small-time cocktail waitress in small-town Louisiana. She's quiet, keeps to herself, and doesn't get out much - not because she's not pretty - she's a very cute bubbly blonde - or not interested in a social life. She really is . . . but Sookie's got a bit of a disability. She can read minds.

A college class gets more than it bargained for when Harper gives a demonstration of her uncanny talent. Instead of just finding one body in an old grave, she finds two: the original occupant and a recently deceased girl whom Harper had tried, and failed, to find two years previously. To dispel suspicions about her innocence, Harper sets out to find the killer - only to find yet another body in the same grave.