Charlotte Adams has gotten herself in enough pickles that the 911 operator, Mona, recognizes her phone number but this time the tales are turned and Charlotte receives a call from Mona who is in a panic because the High School mean girl/bully has returned to town and Mona is certain that she is going to start attacking her again. When one of the mean girl's posse turns up dead, Mona is certain she will be blamed and goes into hiding. But murders keep happening.

Is the killer delivering payback for all the past or is there another reason that the mean girls are dying like flies?

This series is really a lot of fun with quirking characters, o9rganizational tips (I'm grateful for these!) and just a good mystery. ( )

An amateur detective story, which isn't usually my thing. A bit light for my taste, but it did keep me turning the pages despite it all, so barvo! ( )

Warning: This review contains spoilers.

****

I'd been somewhat underwhelmed with books 3 and 4 in the Charlotte Adams series, but Book 5 here is somewhat of a return to form with a case that has a more personal connection to our super-organized sleuth.

In Woodbridge, everyone knows everybody else, and a lot of the main characters in this series went to school together. So when one of the "mean girls" comes back to town, this means trouble for her former victims, including 911 dispatcher Mona Pringle, who turns to Charlotte for comfort. Mona is far from forgiving the bully, Serena. Instead, she gleefully imagines what it would be like to run over Serena. Imagine Charlotte's horror, then, when people connected with Serena's reign of terror start being killed in hit-and-run accidents, and Mona goes missing…

As I said, this is a good case for Charlotte because she actually has a reason for being involved. (This is the trouble with amateur sleuths sometimes; realistically, how often will an ordinary citizen keep stumbling on murders?) She and her group of friends helped Mona deal with the bullying in school, so naturally Charlotte wants to help out this time around. I found the plot gripping and started reading this book at lunch as well as on the bus to and from work, just so I could finish it faster.

And I was quite pleased that Charlotte and Jack finally decided to become an item, although I must admit it was rather a difficult paradigm shift from "we're best friends who live on two floors of one house" to "I guess we'll have to get a king-size bed now that we're living together, since I'm tall." *coughs awkwardly* Especially because, as far as I can recall, Charlotte focuses more on Jack's positive personality traits rather than his physical ones.

I did find the writing somewhat repetitive in parts, namely when new people became involved in the mystery and Charlotte had to update them. Charlotte also spent a bit of time at the beginning being rather oblivious, so people had to break things down in extremely minute detail for her, while I was saying to the book "Yes, I got that. Next point." (Also, when Jack said he was renovating the house he and Charlotte live in, turning it back into a single-family dwelling, I immediately thought "Awww he loves her and wants to live with her for real!" And this was halfway through the book. It's nice to be smarter than the protagonists sometimes.)

Overall I would recommend this to fans of the series, or for those who like a bit of cozy fiction, which really, we all could do with from time to time. ( )