My personal take on Charlene Harris’ Real Murders series

 

So I’ve just finished reading Charlaine Harris’ Real Murders.  Technically reading, anyway.  I don’t do much literal reading nowadays since I don’t have time for such luxury and my myopic eyes seem to be more myopic every time I visit my optometrist (which is an average of 2x a year, by the way). What I actually do is, I listen to audiobooks.  I found it pretty convenient since I am mostly out my house every day, anyway. And it so just helps me be in the mood to do chores while washing dishes or sweeping the floor, or doing laundry. It helps me get through my most tedious and monotonous housework. When I’m out, I just connect my phone to my earbuds, popped them in my ear, open my audio book app, and I can listen to the current book I am into or connect it to my good ole reliable JBL Bluetooth speaker, up the volume, open my audio book app and press play when I’m at home.

Back to the book Real Murders. What immediately struck me while reading the book now was how inconvenient it was for Aurora to not have a mobile phone.   The book was written in the early 1990s and I just couldn’t help thinking about how useful a cell phone was, if Aurora Teagarden, the main character of the book (and the whole series) owned one. Well, that’s what popped into my mind whenever I “read” the parts where she saw a dead body, or a bloody hatchet or just whenever she needed to call for help. On the whole, Real Murders is a good murder mystery to read.  It also managed to keep me guessing on who amongst the Real Murders Club members was the actual murderer. This book also made references to real murders and true crimes (thus the title, Real Murders) which I previously didn’t have any interest in, and didn’t have any knowledge of; but thanks to this book, I actually learned some things real murders related. So I credit this book for additional knowledge and trivia now stored in my own “knowledge bank” because I rarely read non-fiction or textbooks (sad but true and a weakness of mine)  I find that they are almost always boring. So I just loved it when not only can I enjoy the pleasure of being transported to different worlds and different places, I can also learn some things during those “travels.”

My reason behind reading the Aurora Teagarden’s series is because it’s from Charlaine Harris.  She is one of my favorite authors. I am a Charlaine Harris fan.  I loved her Southern Vampires: Sookie Stackhouse series. I’ve read each one of them, novellas and all. I watched True Blood on HBO but they lost me somewhere between season 4 or 5.  Too many changes from the book and I absolutely prefer the twists and turns of the books most of the time to that of the tv show.And that was the end of my True Blood “affair.”   I found that most often than not,  I can’t appreciate the small or big screen version of books. I would always find that digressing from the original plots are always poor substitutes to the original stories.  Unless of course, the authors are the screenwriters of the stories. I don’t know why. It’s probably because when authors are screenwriters, they manage to bring their own unique stamps and their own way of telling their stories to the big screen that make the viewers who are readers of their books less disconnected.

Okay, back to Real Murders again. 😀  I love that the main character, Aurora Teagarden is a librarian.   My favorite hangout when I was still in school was the library so librarians to me are the cool people in my book world.:) 🙂 🙂 But there was one part of the book though where I find Aurora Teagarden stupid.  It was when she let her six-year-old half-brother go out of the house alone to get his baseball bat which he left outside when it was almost dark.  I mean, what kind of stupid who reads real murders, who has just been involved with a series of murder investigations (even if someone already confessed to said murders), who knows the real danger of murders and crimes–allow a six-year-old child go alone (and even hands a flashlight to him??!!) to find a baseball bat when it’s getting dark??? While I grant that that part of the book right there is the start of the climax of the story, some subtle alterations could have been made so as to not let Aurora act so stupidly especially since she was portrayed as a smart, well-read, murder savvy librarian.  Other than that, the book was enjoyable and entertaining.

I am currently on the first few pages of the second Aurora Teagarden series, A Bone To Pick. I just know that if it’s a Charlaine Harris book, I’ll never get disappointed.

Oh, by the way, I followed Ms. Charlaine Harris’ on Facebook and Twitter and she just had an update on the upcoming new tv series for the Aurora Teagarden in Lifetime network soon.  There was a date given but I forgot when.