South of Sanity is a sequel to East of Peculiar, and though I’d rate East a little higher than my fellow reviewer did (probably a B), I liked South even more. While Ms. Ledbetter’s humor is not as raucous, this one will appeal to fans of Stephanie Plum or Linda Howard’s Mr. Perfect.

The opening paragraph proves how apt the comparison is:

“In less than twenty-four hours, Hannah Garvey had survived an assault with a deadly weapon, almost made love with Kinderhook County Sheriff David Hendrickson and was about to console her boss’s sixty-seven-year-old mother who’d just been busted for distributing marijuana to members of her bridge club.”

And a couple of paragraphs later:

“Sunlight did not become her. It was six months too early for Halloween. Three months too late for a ski mask. Five minutes too late for an orgasm. Timing had never been one of her best things.”

Hannah Garvey is the resident manager of Valhalla Springs, a retirement community in the Missouri Ozarks. Given where she lives, it’s not surprising that Hannah has an entire squad of senior sleuths eager to ‘help’ investigate any criminal activity. Just picture Stephanie Plum surrounded by Grandma and Grandpa Mazurs and you get the idea. When David is suspected of shooting an unarmed suspect, Hannah is pressed into sleuthing service by her senior constituents. David’s job is on the line and Hannah doesn’t need much encouragement to take matters into her own hands.

What’s great about the investigating that Hannah undertakes is that most of it flows pretty naturally. In any mystery featuring an amateur detective it’s always a bit problematic for the author to explain why someone who doesn’t have any official standing can be asking questions. Ms. Ledbetter avoids that pitfall by having Hannah have just enough help from official and/or informed sources. She generally has a reason to be where she is and to find out the information she needs. Another convention the author circumvented is how to explain multiple deaths within a short space of time in the same small community. The death in this book occurs while David is on an official police call. What she’ll do with the third book in this series is up for grabs, but this one certainly crossed all it’s t’s and dotted it’s i’s. What’s more, it did so in a humorous and spirited fashion.

The little voice in my head that nags me every time I write a review is clamoring for me to talk a bit about Hannah and David. They’re everything you could want. Think of David as a cross between Morelli and Ranger and you’ll have an idea of how Hannah views David. He’s got a lot of Morelli’s cockiness, but it’s tempered by a more mature strength. South of Sanity gets the grade it does because of the strong mystery but also because the romance seems like one that is happening between real adults. David doesn’t crawl into his home and tell Hannah to stay away from him because he’ll only bring her trouble. Hannah doesn’t suspect David of being guilty of manslaughter while wanting to jump his bones. Instead they examine what they know about the death and each other and make rational decisions. The relationship is driven by their needs and the natural wariness of adults who’ve experienced life’s ups and downs, not by plot points and misunderstandings that are thrown in to create unreal conflict. Kudos to the author!

A couple of last points: Though David and Hannah’s potential physical contact is interrupted in increasingly humorous ways throughout the book, their foreplay is almost enough to give this a warm rating. Rather than being a straight A, this is more of an A- because I couldn’t quite believe the conclusion of the mystery. It’s not that there were dangling clues or missing explanations, they just didn’t add up to a totally plausible story.

That being said, I’d certainly recommend this to readers who love mysteries with a strong dose of romance. Though I’m pretty sure Ms. Ledbetter only intends this to be a three book series (with North of Clever, due out in Dec. 2001, being the third) I hope that she’ll reconsider and write some more. David and Hannah could work together for many books to come.