Review: By Death: Books 1-3 by Dale Mayer 5 of 5 stars

By Death: Books 1-3 by Dale Mayer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Great collection of three mystery stories with a little romance embedded within the story.

#1 - Touched by Death 5*
Anthropologist Jade Hansen had already been to Haiti once before dealing with unexpected death which had cost her an unborn child, a relationship and almost her sanity. However, after a year she was determined to face her issues and was returning there in a mortuary team to recover the bodies of an American family out of a mass grave. Dane Carter was an independent contractor and had put his own life on hold while he visited his brother and was working on rebuilding Jacmel after the quake. He had really had enough of his pregnant sister in law and her crazy family and so was thinking about how he could leave and go home until he met Jade and realised what his own life is missing. As the mortuary team starts to work it almost feels as if malevolence has been released from the earth and that it is not putting Jade's ghosts to rest but putting Dane right into the middle of it. Can they work out what is going on and will everyone come out of it whole?

This was one hell of a mystery/suspense story with multiple layers and multiple potential people involved. No matter which way you think it is going to end, it won't finish that way and will have different twists that you hadn't even thought of. Entwined into all of that, there was the love story between Jade and Dane slowly developing which became central to it as it neared a conclusion. Well written and easy to read, I definitely needed to find out who had done it (and was wrong in my guess too).

#2 - Haunted by Death 5*
Meg Pearce is an anthropologist and she feels like death haunts her as in her last summer before college an innocent camping trip ended in a friend’s disappearance. This had the effect of destroying her life because she lost her innocence, the plans she has for her future and even worse she lost her best friend/lover. After seventeen years, she has reluctantly returned to the same area, however, a gruesome discovery has sent her reeling back to the events that changed everything. Chad Ingram is a police detective and has spent the last seventeen years trying to solve the mystery of that camping trip so he can regain his life and more importantly the woman he lost - the love of his life. But this time death has not finished with them and even worse this time they are firmly in the sights.

Wow - this story was very dramatic and had lots of layers with many candidates for the guilty person, I certainly didn't see who it was and even when I had worked some of the story out, I was still wrong about who was responsible for it. Well written and very clever in the way the story was structured. I really enjoyed being on the journey with the characters in the story in order to work out what was going on.

#3 - Chilled by Death 5*
Stacey Carter had lost several friends in a tragic accident and so had become a loner, just focussing on her career with the dead. She knows she needs to pull herself together and get past it but her job is not a conversation starter. When her brother finally succeeds in coaxing her back to the same mountain for a holiday to help her heal, she realises he is right - it is finally time for her complete the healing process and move on with her life. Royce is a long time friend and best friend with her brother George. He wants to be so much more with Stacey and is thrilled that she is back and fighting her depression. After all, last time they were together he completely blew it and he is determined to grasp this second chance. However, when they are all out in the cold the atmosphere quickly shifts when they find a dead man in the snow which is then quickly followed by one of their own party going missing. It will take everything both Stacey and Royce have to make it through the nightmare of this holiday and stay alive as well as sane. It quickly develops such that the party members can't work out who to trust including themselves. Who will survive at the end of this nightmare holiday?

This was a really dramatic murder mystery all wrapped around the story or both Stacey's recovery and the relationship that may be rekindled between Stacey and Royce. There were many layers in the story with different paths that it could take. First I thought it was one person, then it was another, then there was the surprise as to who exactly was responsible. Very enjoyable and bizarrely quite good fun trying to solve the mystery of who was the killer in the end - in the end I was only partially right. Well written and very easy to read and understand.

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