To say that Daniels’ first in a new mystery series starring an alternative healer was a bit of a disappointment is more then an understatement. Not only are the characters rather silly and the plotting reliant on more then one coincidence, Daniels is an author who I greatly enjoyed under another name. As Jacqueline Girdner, Claire Daniels wrote another mystery series also set in California. Her protagonist for that series was Kate Jasper, and comparing the two series is like night and day. I wonder what happened.

Though her earlier series had a number of new age-y characters and plots, the new age quotient has been seriously, or do I mean ridiculously, upped this time around, and not for the better. Cally Lazar calls herself a recovering attorney and is now an energy worker. What that means, as far as I could gather, is that she can read people’s auras and assist them in coming up with ways to affect a change to make them feel better. I get the reading auras part but the helping to change their auras escaped me because though the book starts off in middle of one of Cally’s auracular readings, it never returns to one. The reader gets to see her in action exactly once (or half once).

Cally’s job is central to the story, previous statements notwithstanding, since it is in that one aura reading that she makes contact with a murdered man and decides she is the only one who can prove he was murdered and then solve his murder. The victim was Seeger Snell. He jumped off the balcony at a bed and breakfast that plays hosts to “Love Workshops.” His wife, Patricia (Trica), saw him jump but she’s not convinced it was suicide. As Cally reads Trica’s aura she becomes equally convinced and decides to head for the B&B to join the next workshop. Coincidentally, everyone who attended the workshop when Seeger died shows up again. How lucky can an amateur detective get?

Joining Cally on her sleuthing mission are friends, relatives, and a former partner. That’s the first big problem with this book. That Cally would drop everything to run off to investigate the murder of a client’s (who she just met) husband (who she never met) is just barely believable since this is an amateur detective mystery. But that Warren Kapp (who is a retired, high-powered attorney), her best friend hypno-therapist Dee-Dee, her former lover Roy, and her siblings would all do the same was really stretching things. Once at the B& B these “lovable” loons are immediately immersed in a group of even wackier characters, the suspects.

Also straining credibility is the highly quirky nature of every character in the book. Having Cally surrounded by quirky, alternative characters would have been fine, if she wasn’t such a kook herself. Cally has her extra-sensory powers that allow her to read auras, fine, I can see where that would make a protagonist interesting. But then the author goes overboard. Cally also uses the cane she carries, because of her psychosomatic leg problems, to practice CANE-FU! She doesn’t swear like other people, instead she exclaims things like “son of a lizard” and “criminy” and “Dack!” Criminy I can take, but Dack? I freely admit that I’m pretty incapable of swearing and find myself saying things like “sunny beach” and “jeepers” when in public, but to see them in print is almost as silly and distracting as Cally’s expressions. Every time she said “Dack” I was thrown out of the narrative thread, and that’s not good.

That Cally is such a nut makes it difficult to empathize with or believe in any of these characters. What Daniels/Girdner did so well with her earlier mystery series was to have a protagonist and her significant other who are otherwise fully grounded. While others around them could be quirky, alternative, kooky, Kate and Wayne acted as the straight men.

Mentioning Wayne of the Kate Jasper books brings me to Cally’s love interest – Roy. This is a mystery, not a romance. I got that. But Roy was about as far as you could get from an interesting partner for Cally. He was whiny and weird and had no chemistry whatsoever with Cally. From a reviewing standpoint I did not grade down because there was no romance; I graded down because Roy was just one more underdeveloped character, identified only by his quirks. And his “quirk” was the fact that he dumped Cally to protect her from the dark forces surrounding him. His every appearance was like a small dark blot on the story-telling. Perhaps he was surrounded by “dark forces” after all?

Body of Intuition isn’t a total failure; the mystery does flow along fairly steadily. The author’s experience shows here. I was mildly interested in who killed Seeger and did spend find a few surprises along the way. But the overabundance of off-the-wall characters, all leading wacky lives and converging at the B&B was too much; where’s Kate Jasper when you need her?