Grave Secrets: A Lavington Windsor Mystery

British author James’s fun, fast debut introduces Lavington “Toni” Windsor, “estate agent by day, necromancer by night.” Toni has lived all her life in the sleepy county of Staffordshire, where “most sudden end-of-life incidents... tended to involve tractors. Or cows. Sometimes both.” On occasion, she raises the dead in order to help her police officer brother, William, solve a rare local murder. A case that has haunted both William and Toni for months is that of an unidentified young woman who was dismembered. Despite her prodigious talent, Toni has been unable to get into contact with this Jane Doe, but once she finally does, her subsequent inquiries wind up involving liaisons, often romantic, with elegantly attired zombies and vampires. Since the undead supply all the clues, conventional investigative techniques are nonexistent. Fans of Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse will want to check out Toni. Agent: Simon Kavanagh, Mic Cheetham Assoc. (U.K.). (Sept.)