Just finished reading...

Grave Secret by Charlaine Harris.

Charlaine Harris has previously written an 8-book series about librarian Aurora Teagarden and a 5-book series about housekeeper-cum-private detective Lily Bard. Currently, besides the immensely popular Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire series, Ms. Harris writes another wonderful paranormal mystery series about Harper Connelly, who is able to find (and, to some extent, "read") dead bodies as a result of having been struck by lightning when a teen.

Harper and her step-brother Tolliver Lang have turned her talent into a business, travelling the country detecting bodies, mostly in order to provide closure for relatives of missing persons. Because she is able to read what was going through the victim's mind just before death, she has occasionally helped solve a suspicious death.

In this book, the fourth in the series, Harper and Tolliver are in Texas, visiting the two little girls they both regard as sisters, who have been taken in by their aunt and uncle. Tolliver's older brother Mark informs him that their father has been released from prison, and would like to reconnect with his children to start over. Neither Tolliver or Harper believe that Matthew Lang has become a new man, and their suspicions seem justified when he approaches the little girls without permission from their adoptive parents.

This complicated situation is further convoluted when Tolliver is hit by a bullet they believe was intended for Harper. But is the gunshot related to the case they just completed, also in Texas, or to something much deeper in their past?

Grave Secret was unputdownable, and I stayed up way too late finishing it. Having forgotten that this is the last volume in the series, I was upset when I finished the book, although the ending does provide some very satisfying conclusions.