Expired Listings by D.M. Barr

Blurb: House up for sale?
When the lockbox goes on,
You won’t believe what these agents pull off …

Someone is ‘deactivating’ the Realtors in Rock Canyon and almost no one seems to care. Not the surviving brokers, who consider the serial killings a competitive boon. Not the town’s residents, who see the murders as a public service. In fact, the only person who’s even somewhat alarmed is Dana Black, a kinky, sharp-witted yet emotionally skittish Realtor who has no alibi for the crimes because during each, she was using her empty listings for games like Bondage Bingo with her sadistic lover, Dare. And yet, mysteriously, all clues are pointing her way.

Along with clearing her name and avoiding certain death at the hands of the ‘Realtor Retaliator,’ Dana has an even bigger problem: she’s inadvertently become a person of interest in more ways than one to Aidan Cummings, the sexy albeit vanilla detective investigating the case. While his attentions are tempting, Dana is torn—does she continue her ironically ‘safe’ but sterile BDSM relationship with Dare, or risk real intimacy with Aidan?

Kink, Suspense and Satire–Expired Listings masterfully combines all three while exploring the universal need for validation and the toxic nature of revenge.

4 stars

I didn’t realize there was no actual sex in the book.  ::face palm:: I did it. I totally judged a book by its cover!  And what a fabulous cover it is!

The MC is hilarious in this book.  Her wit and charm are effortless and I love how she incorporates her BDSM lifestyle into this book without it being raunchy or uncouth.  If anything it made me more interested in this lifestyle. 🙂

The author wrote the people who are part of this lifestyle three dimensionally.  They are not sex symbols nor are they sex addicts.  They are normal people with normal jobs who happens to have abnormal tastes in what turns them on.  They have families and day jobs, they go out on lunch dates and gossip.  The author made it seem all very normal and ordinary.  Which shows me how talented she is.

Combine that with her mommy issues and you’ve got a recipe for a great multifacated story. It reads almost like a cozy, but it is not.  The mystery was very well laid out, I pegged the whodunit way later in the book than I normally do so that was pretty cool for me.

While I don’t usually read mysteries now a days, if these are the kind that are being published, I could be persuaded to pick them back up.