Charlaine Harris - Real Murders (An Aurora Teagarden Mystery)

Praise for
Real Murders

Real Murders is the first adventure for Harriss perceptive protagonist and I eagerly look forward to the secondHarriss story alternately charms and chills, a difficult combination she manages with aplomb and brilliance.

Carolyn Hart, award-winning author of Set Sail for Murder

An ingenious plot and sufficient flow of blood keep the pages flying in Harriss novelHarris draws the guilty and the innocent into an engrossing tale while inventing a heroine as capable and potentially complex as P.D. Jamess Cordelia Gray.

Publishers Weekly

Clever pacing along with ample red herrings and judiciously placed clues keep Harriss story moving briskly. Lets hope for another fast-paced mystery featuring Aurora and her friends.

School Library Journal

Praise for Charlaine Harriss
Southern Vampire novels featuring
Sookie Stackhouse

The goofy charm of Harriss world, with its humor and occasional terror, is what makes Dead Until Dark so delightful.

The Denver Post

Harris brings off this blend of mystery and vampires better than most.

San Francisco Chronicle

A fun, fast, funny, and wonderfully intriguing blend of vampire and mystery thats hard to put down and should not be missed.

Susan Sizemore, New York Times bestselling author of Primal Heat and the Laws of the Blood series

Praise for Charlaine Harriss
Harper Connelly Mysteries

Too much fun.

Wilmington (NC) Star-News

Harris debuts a series that just might surpass all her others in popularityWill have readers dying for more.

Booklist

Fast pacing, excellent character development, and a strong story lineThis fabulous opening gambit affirms that every series Charlaine Harris creates is utterly fantastic.

Midwest Book Review

Praise for Charlaine Harriss
Lily Bard Mysteries

Lily Bard [is] the equal of Kay Scarpetta, Kinsey Millhone, and V. I. Warshawski.

Library Journal

First-rate mystery.

Midwest Book Review

Lily Bard gives as good as she gets. The reading is fast and the actions faster, proving that women really are the better half.

Mostly Murder

One of the best-drawn and most compelling characters in contemporary mystery fictioncomplex, smart, street-wise, tough.

Booklist

Praise for
A Secret Rage

CompellingPowerful.

The Boston Globe

Not many novels, and no mysteries, have shaken me as brutally as A Secret Rage.

Los Angeles Times

Absorbing tensionEffective crime fiction.

Booklist

A thriller built on a vital issueRiveting.

Publishers Weekly

Praise for
Sweet and Deadly

A first-rate mystery with special characterAs convincing as it is surprising in the final revelation.

The Washington Post

Harris writes neatly and with assurance, and she avoids the goo that makes equivalent books so sticky.

The New York Times Book Review

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

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Ace Books by Charlaine Harris

The Sookie Stackhouse Novels

DEAD UNTIL DARK

LIVING DEAD IN DALLAS

CLUB DEAD

DEAD TO THE WORLD

DEAD AS A DOORNAIL

DEFINITELY DEAD

ALL TOGETHER DEAD

MANY BLOODY RETURNS
edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner

Berkley Prime Crime Books by
Charlaine Harris

The Harper Connelly Mysteries

GRAVE SIGHT

GRAVE SURPRISE

AN ICE COLD GRAVE

The Lily Bard Mysteries

SHAKESPEARES LANDLORD

SHAKESPEARES CHAMPION

SHAKESPEARES TROLLOP

SHAKESPEARES COUNSELOR

The Aurora Teagarden Mysteries

REAL MURDERS

SWEET AND DEADLY

A SECRET RAGE

Real Murders

An Aurora Teagarden Mystery

Charlaine Harris

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

REAL MURDERS

A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright 1990 by Charlaine Harris Schulz.
Cover art by Lisa Desimini.
Cover design by Judith Lagerman.

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

ISBN: 1-4295-7156-X

BERKLEY PRIME CRIME
Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

To Mother and Father

Contents

Chapter One

T onight I want to tell you about that most fascinating of murder mysteries, the Wallace case, I told my mirror Enthusiastically.

I tried Sincere after that; then Earnest.

My brush caught in a tangle. Shoot! I said, and tried again.

I think the Wallace case can easily fill our whole program tonight, I said Firmly.

We had twelve regular members, which worked out well with twelve programs a year. Not all cases could fill up a two-hour program, of course. Then the member responsible for presenting the Murder of the Month, as we jokingly called it, would have a guest speakersomeone from the police department in the city, or a psychologist who treated criminals, or the director of the local rape crisis center. Once or twice, wed watched a movie.

But Id come up lucky in the draw. There was more than enough material on the Wallace case, yet not so much that Id be compelled to hurry over it. Wed allocated two meetings for Jack the Ripper. Jane Engle had taken one for the victims and the circumstances surrounding the crimes and Arthur Smith had taken another on the police investigation and the suspects. You cant skimp Jack.

The elements of the Wallace case are these, I continued. A man who called himself Qualtrough, a chess tournament, an apparently inoffensive woman named Julia Wallace, and of course the accused, her husband, William Herbert Wallace himself. I gathered all my hair into a brown switch and debated whether to put it in a roll on the back of my head, braid it, or just fasten a band around it to keep it off my face. The braid. It made me feel artsy and intellectual. As I divided my hair into clumps, my eyes fell on the framed studio portrait of my mother shed given me on my last birthday with an offhand, You said you wanted one. My mother, who looks a lot like Lauren Bacall, is at least five-foot six, elegant to her fingertips, and has built her own small real estate empire. I am four-foot eleven, wear big round tortoise-rimmed glasses, and have fulfilled my childhood dream by becoming a librarian. And she named me Aurora, though to a woman herself baptized Aida, Aurora may not have seemed so outrageous.