This Guest Review is from Lara Diane and is a review of both the first book and the next two. Lara is a teacher, feminist, knitter and proud co-parent to the greatest three-legged black cat in the southern hemisphere.

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Tara Sharp is a woman I would very much like to be, and that’s just how I like my protagonists – worthy of admiration, but not perfect.

Tara is in her mid-twenties and is in that typical space… no job, no boyfriend, moved back in with her parents (into their converted garage and – blessedly – not her old bedroom). She is a little different though, as she has a whole extra sense: she sees auras. Her story opens in book 1, Sharp Shooter, with a psychiatrist/friend sending her to Mr Hara and his Paralanguage school. She trains to become a private investigator with an added string to her bow – reading auras. This sense translates to “intense intuition and mostly-reliable lie detector” in the field. The various jobs she goes on give Tara a chance to be empathic and smart, and to sometimes take wild, risky leaps that have some interesting outcomes. Tara’s actions lead her to some eyebrow-raising skirmishes with a crime king-pin, Johnny Vogue, who is utterly repulsive and terrifying.

These skirmishes start off innocently enough. In the first book, bolstered by Mr Hara’s tuition, Tara has the bright idea of teaching lessons on effective communication. Two of her first three students find themselves in the midst of Tara’s burgeoning foray into private investigation. In fact, Tara ends up dragging most of the people around her into this new world – whether she or they like it or not. Her cases range from the predictable (is my partner cheating on me? – although it must be said that I did NOT see that resolution coming) to the slightly unusual (serving as a bodyguard for a melodramatic US rapper) with Johnny Vogue and his ilk forming the evil nexus towards which Tara inexorably marches.

While these books have a touch of the supernatural about them, the story remains firmly human. Tara’s actions, thoughts, and feelings, and those of the people around her, are within the realm of human, albeit a slightly more interesting than average human. Tara’s close friends from school also live in Perth and her connection to them is a sincere and genuine one. Tara’s parents are retired and besotted with their two birds; birds that, incidentally, have more idiosyncrasies than my three-legged cat. While Tara and her mother don’t have the most positive mother-daughter relationship, it goes only as far as eye-rolling rather than lasting emotional damage. And while Tara certainly grows/learns/evolves, those around her tend to remain flat. BUT, they are gorgeous portraits of kind, sometimes flawed, human beings, so I don’t resent them their flatness. They’re the Mona Lisas of flat characters.

Of Tara’s beaus, there is only one that makes me feel fluttery, and that’s the enormously tall, phenomenally pheromoned Nick Tozzi. His current marriage to the shiny show pony Antonia Tozzi is a spanner in the works, but is it a permanent spanner? There are other suitors in Tara’s life, but I am unashamedly biased against anything they’re bringing to the party.

In genre, I’d pin this book as a cozy mystery with an adrenaline kick. The mystery elements are the equivalent of an hour of yoga – a damn good workout, but not enough to leave you with spotty vision and the shakes. While there are really lovely romance elements, it is VERY slow burn, so if you need the rush of a happy match, you’ll need another series to scratch that itch.

Other reviewers have (rightly) linked this book to Janet Evanovitch’s Stephanie Plum series. I went through a glorious obsession with the Plum series, but after a while I fell out of love with them – partly, because of the perpetual love triangle and, partly, because of the increasingly ridiculous and decreasingly charming plots. Tara’s story unfolds in a series of (so far) four books. I’ve read the first three, but keep resisting reading the last one, because I don’t want her story to be over. While there is a novella lined up as book 5, I’m still not sure where her story goes…what if this series succumbs to the same fate as the Stephanie Plum series did?

I remain in indecision, which is surprising, because within hours of finishing each of the first three Tara Sharp books, I bought and began reading the next. For a week, my life revolved around Tara Sharp. The vibrancy of Delacourt’s writing, her finely drawn plots, and the richness of each character kept me coming back for more.

And now I am paused on the precipice of Book 4. Should I go for it? Have you read these books? Does it go the way of the Plum series or does Sharp stay sharp?

I resisted that pun for the first 647 words of this review, but in the end I could resist no longer; just like I can’t resist Tara herself.