Item: Death, Taxes and Extra Hold Hairspray
Rating: 4.00
Author: murderbydeath

by Diane Kelly

Tara Holloway might be having a bad hair day. Or month. But she's got eyes in the back of her head...and when it comes to taxes, no one's going to leap through a loophole on her watch! When you're an agent for the IRS, it's always tax time. And this season, Tara is up to her neck in work with two very knotty cases. One involves a charismatic minister who's using his mega-church as a tax shelter. The other is a crazy militant who's trying to turn Texas into a separate country. With her boyfriend out of town and her partner reassigned, Tara is on her own-and things are getting hairy. If dealing with the Lone Star State isn't enough, Tara has other new issues to take into account: There's a sexy new agent named Nick, who's got her head in the clouds...and Tara's boss, Lu, who's having a hair problem of epic proportions: not even her Chinese contraband industrial-strength hairspray is enough to keep her signature strawberry blonde beehive from falling flat. Can Tara help Lu find a wig-and keep from wigging out over Nick? Love, updos, taxes-this time, Tara's got a whole lot of kinks to iron out...

I think this may be my favourite book in this series so far. I thought that the plot was a slightly different spin on the typical mystery - no murders for a start - and the need for Tara to be creative in order to bring down the 'bad guy'. I put this on my shelves as a cozy mystery, but really it's a bit more of a chick-lit mystery - the romance is just a little bit more explicit and the language just a little bit more vulgar than what most would consider "cozy". But the humour is dry and wry and the romantic tension is ratcheted up a notch in this book as Tara tries to decide who is a better fit in her life, Brett or Nick.

An excellent read, I really enjoyed it.

Death, Taxes and Extra Hold Hairspray (Tara Holloway, #3)

by Diane Kelly

Reviewed by MurderByDeath on Jul 9, 2012

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