Review: Tagged for Death

Tagged for Death by Sherry Harris
Published December 2, 2014 by Kensington
Source: NetGalley

Starting your life over at age thirty-eight isn't easy, but that's what Sarah Winston finds herself facing when her husband CJ runs off with a 19-year-old temptress named Tiffany. Sarah's self-prescribed therapy happily involves hitting all the garage and tag sales in and around her small town of Ellington, Massachusetts. If only she could turn her love for bargain hunting into a full-time career.

One man's junk is another man's treasure

But after returning from a particularly successful day searching for yard sale treasures, Sarah finds a grisly surprise in one of her bags: a freshly bloodied shirt…that undoubtedly belongs to her ex, CJ, who now happens to be Ellington's chief of police. If that's not bad enough, it seems Tiffany has gone missing. Now it's up to Sarah to prove that her cold-hearted ex is not a cold-blooded killer…

But finding that treasure can be murder.

My Thoughts

My first thought to object to the official description—Sarah's husband doesn't run off with a 19-year-old, he has a one night stand. But that's enough to set the plot in motion.

Divorced from her philandering husband, Sarah is on her own for the first time in her life. In addition to living alone, she's no longer living on a military base with its built-in social life for the wives of officers. Fortunately, she's able to continue volunteering at the on-base thrift shop.

Sarah loves thrift shops and garage sales. After introducing her friend Carol to garage sales and driving her around to several of them on a Saturday morning, Carol asks her to organize a sale to clear out her overstuffed garage. Then a visitor to Carol's garage sale offers to pay Sarah to help her, and a new business is born.

But, while Sarah is running garage sales and volunteering at the thrift shop, there's something more serious she needs to do—prove that her ex-husband isn't a murderer. Turns out that the young woman CJ had an affair with has gone missing. A couple of weeks later, the unidentifiable body of a young woman is found behind the thrift shop and CJ's ID badge is nearby. Everyone assumes it's the missing Tiffany. Sarah pursues clue after clue, crossing paths with the local police and military investigators in her quest to prove CJ's innocence.

I enjoyed Tagged for Death by Sherry Harris. It's the first of a cozy series and I look forward to reading the sequels as they become available.

★★★☆☆

Note that I received a free copy of The Glass Magician from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.