Product Description

So Carlotta Wren's life hasn't turned out as she'd planned. She didn't plan for her parents to skip bail for a white-collar crime, leaving her to raise her brother. She didn't plan on having the silver spoon ripped from her mouth and forgoing college to work retail. She didn't plan on her blue-blood fiancé dumping her. And she didn't plan on still being single ten years later, working at Neiman Marcus, with no idea where her fugitive parents are. But she's coping. Until—

—her lovable brother is arrested, and the hunky cop decides to reopen her parents' case.

—her brother becomes a body mover for the morgue, and his sexy boss gets Carlotta involved.

—her former fiancé's wife (a good customer) is murdered, fingering Carlotta.

With three men in her life, Carlotta has added motivation to help bag a murderer to keep her own well-dressed body from being next on the list!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24138 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 384 pages

From Booklist
Carlotta Wren's pampered life as the daughter of wealthy, doting parents ends abruptly when said parents commit a white-collar crime and leave the country to avoid prosecution. Carlotta is left with Wesley, her bright but trouble-prone brother. Working as a salesclerk in Atlanta's Neiman Marcus store, Carlotta endures the catty comments of former "friends" such as Angela Ashford, the woman who married Carlotta's fiance when he broke up with her after the scandal with her parents. Now Wesley has become a gambling addict. When Carlotta makes him get a job, she never dreamed that Wesley would become a body mover--someone who removes corpses from nursing homes, hospitals, and crime scenes--and that one of his first assignments would be to pick up a very dead Angela Ashford. Detective Jack Terry, who still hasn't given up on solving Carlotta and Wesley's parents' case, is convinced that Carlotta killed Angela, and he finds his attraction to her deeply annoying. A popular romantic suspense author, Bond has successfully switched to the crime genre, bringing along her trademark humor and panache. Watch for future titles in the Body Movers series. Shelley Mosley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
". . . a true catch-you-by-surprise plot twist that gives the story a good yank in the right direction." -- Publishers Weekly on Party Crashers

"There should be a notice on her books: For a really GOOD time, read Stephanie Bond!" -- America Online Romance Fiction Forum

"This is the best book I've ever read!" -- Stephanie's mom

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
"Does this make my ass look big?"

Carlotta Wren stood in the dressing room of Neiman Marcus in the Lenox Mall inAtlanta, Georgia, her arms full of designer bathing suits that Angela Ashford, one of her least favorite customers, wanted to try on. They weren't even halfway through the selections and already Carlotta wanted to murder the woman.

She dutifully glanced at Angela's surgically sculpted glutes falling out of a tiny patch of metallic-blue fabric. "No, your, um, ass looks…great."

Angela tossed her blond hair over her shoulder and pouted at her rear reflection in the three-way mirror. "You think?"

Carlotta's mouth watered to say, "Way better than it looked in high school," but bit her tongue. It was part of the game, after all—Angela played the role of poor little rich girl with a confidence problem, and Carlotta played the stroking, sympathetic friend. Both of them deserved an Oscar.

Angela turned around and carefully rearranged her newly acquired breasts in the bikini top that barely covered her nipples. Then she slipped her narrow feet into the silver high-heeled sandals sitting nearby and performed a three-quarter turn to peruse her long, slender figure from all angles. Carlotta tried not to compare her own ample curves to the woman's lean lines. Or her own gap-toothed grin to Angela's perfect, Clorox smile.

She was not jealous of Angela Ashford. "This suit is a definite maybe," Angela announced. Carlotta managed not to roll her eyes—the sixth "definite maybe" so far. "I have to warn you that the trim on that suit won't hold up to chlorine."

Angela made a face. "Good grief, I don't actually swim in our new pool—I don't even know how to swim. I just want to look amazing."

Carlotta bit down on the inside of her cheek. "Do you want to choose from the ones you've set aside so far, or do you want to try on the rest of these?"

Angela looked irritated. "I'll try on the rest." Then she smiled meanly. "And I'll be needing several new spring outfits. With shoes, of course. Peter told me to treat myself to anything I wanted since he just got a huge bonus and our wedding anniversary is coming up. He's so generous."

Carlotta busied herself removing the next bathing suit from its hanger, trying not to react. Peter, as in Carlotta's former fiancé. Just like every time Angela came in for a shopping binge, Carlotta reminded herself that her relationship with Peter Ashford had ended over a decade ago. To be precise, one week after her father had skipped bail on his indictment for investment fraud and he and her mother had gone on the run. The local media had had a field day.

RANDOLPH WREN FLIES THE COOP

RANDOLPH WREN, FUGITIVE JAILBIRD RANDOLPH WREN AND WIFE VALERIE ABANDON CHILDREN

Just a few weeks shy of eighteen, Carlotta hadn't been a child, but she'd led a rather charmed and sheltered life up to that point. Suddenly faced with raising her nineyear-old brother, Wesley, and with no extended family to rely upon, she had clung to her boyfriend, Peter. Too tightly, apparently, because after the headlines had exploded, he had explained over the telephone that their lives had grown too far apart—he was in college at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, and she still had to finish her last semester of high school in Atlanta. Translation: Your name is tainted and I don't want to be associated with your family scandal.

With maturity and hindsight, she had come to understand why Peter had bowed out, but at the time, the rejection of the man she had loved for most of her teenage years, the man who had taken her virginity, had been akin to having her heart surgically removed.

"I hope it doesn't make you uncomfortable when I talk about Peter," Angela said as she yanked the tie to the bikini top, baring her rigid boobs. She kicked the two-hundred-dollar scrap of Lycra across the floor of the dressing room.

"N-no," Carlotta said, scrambling to rescue her merchandise. She straightened, then handed Angela a onepiece suit and gave a little laugh. "Why should it?"

Angela stepped out of the minuscule bikini bottoms and stood nude before Carlotta for a few seconds before stretching the next swimsuit over her tight bod.

"Because, well, you know, the whole pretend engagement you two had when we were in high school," Angela said, preening in the mirror.

The Cartier engagement ring was proof that it had been more than a "pretend" engagement, but Carlotta wet her lips and forced a casual note into her voice. "That was a lifetime ago. We were…kids."

"That's what he says," Angela offered cheerfully. "And that if the two of you had actually married—" she laughed at the improbability "—that it never would have lasted."

Carlotta's heart twisted, but she managed a smile. "Then everything worked out for the best, didn't it?"

In the mirror, Angela leveled her feline gaze on Carlotta. "I suppose so."

Carlotta steered the conversation back to clothes and, thankfully, Angela was distracted by the appearance of the "perfect" bikini (two of them) and the armfuls of designer dresses and pantsuits that Carlotta pulled from every couture department. A phone call to the shoe department on the lower floor brought Michael Lane to the women's clothing department. He headed toward Carlotta, pushing a hand truck laden with colorful boxes of Pucci and Gucci, Don Ciccillo and Donald J. Pliner. "Here's everything we have in size seven narrow."

"Thanks—you're a dear."

He gave Carlotta a wry smile. "How are you holding up?" Carlotta scowled toward the closed door of the dressing room. "I'm ready to strangle her."

"Down, girl. Double-A is one of your best customers." Carlotta smirked at Michael's use of her nickname for Angela. "I got an eyeful of her latest upgrade—let's just say she's no longer a double-A in the bra department."

He clucked. "Hey, what do you expect? The competition is tough in Angela Ashford's social stratum."

In Angela Ashford's social stratum. Michael didn't realize that he was talking about an arena that Carlotta herself had been destined for prior to having her life jerked out from under her. Michael wasn't a native ofAtlanta, and she didn't go out of her way to tell friends and co-workers her entire sordid family history. In fact, she usually lied. She'd gotten quite good at lying and pretending. "I suppose you're right," Carlotta conceded. "But, Christ, she always makes me feel like such a peon. And she's in rare form today."

He looked sympathetic. "Just remember that commission is the best revenge."

Carlotta laughed ruefully and waved goodbye as she wheeled the shoes toward the dressing room. Why did Angela insist on shopping with Carlotta at her beck and call? She could shop at any boutique in Atlanta or, as her own mother used to do, she could call the store and have a personal shopper select items and bring them to her home for her approval. Or she could simply seek the assistance of another clerk at Neiman's. But the woman seemed to take great pleasure in shopping under Carlotta's care, which, Carlotta realized, was a thinly veiled excuse for Angela to flaunt her successful life with Peter. It stung, but in truth, Carlotta needed the commission to pay the seemingly unlimited number of bills that she and Wesley, now nineteen years old, generated.

At the thought of her brother, a bittersweet pang struck her. Wesley had never fully recovered from their parents" abandonment and had suffered more than his share of emotional problems. When he was younger, those problems had manifested into behavioral issues in school, exacerbated by the fact that his IQ was higher than that of most of his instructors, especially in math. Despite his intellect, Wesley had barely graduated high school last year, and now as a directionless adult, his problems manifested into compulsive behavior—more specifically, gambling.

His affinity for poker had landed him in debt up to his neck—and hers. And he'd been foolish enough to borrow from some unsavory characters. A henchman for one of the loan sharks had come to see her at the department store a few months ago, threatening bodily harm to both of them if Wesley didn't make a payment. Inadvertently, her brother always seemed to drag her into his messes, but every time she'd considered telling him that he was of age and to hit the road, she couldn't. She couldn't abandon him as her parents had, yet the knot of worry in her chest never eased. She agonized over what trouble he might get into next, and how they might stay afloat.

Carlotta sighed. One of the worst things about living paycheck to paycheck was imagining Angela Ashford having a one-hundred-dollar lunch with her friends—many of them girls Carlotta had gone to school with and had once considered her friends—saying, "That poor Carlotta Wren, still single and working retail, can you imagine?" But if it was the price she had to pay for a hefty commission, so be it. If Angela spent true to form, the commission on this sale alone would be enough to pay this month's mortgage and electric bill.

Or at least last month's.

Carlotta opened the door to the dressing room to find Angela sitting on a bench, half-naked, drinking from a silver flask. She quickly swallowed and wiped her mouth. "Just getting a head start on my two-martini lunch."

Carlotta remained silent but knew that anyone who packed their own booze had a problem. Her mother had kept a similar flask in her purse for whenever the urge struck for a "drinkie-poo."

"I brought shoes," Carlotta said brightly, wheeling in the bounty.

Angela pushed to her feet shakily enough to tell Carlotta that she'd taken more than one "drinkie-poo" in Carlotta's absence, but apparently it had given the woman enough energy to embark upon another spending binge that included six outfits, eight pairs of shoes, including a pair of tall, exotic bla...

Customer Reviews

What a fun story....
The title of this book is what drew me to it originally and I am so glad that it did. This was such a fun and entertaining story with a great criminal case thrown in. I am usually good at guessing the killer in a story but this one came out of nowhere and I was very surprised.
I am so excited to see that there is going to be another in what I hope will become a series with these delightful characters.

engaging amateur sleuth
When her father Randolph Wren and her mother Valerie fled Atlanta rather then face criminal proceedings, they left behind their eighteen years old daughter Carlotta and her nine years old brother Wesley. Not long after the scandal exploded, Carlotta's fiancé U of Tennessee student Peter Ashford ended their engagement and eventually married obnoxious Angela. Carlotta's fairy tale life ended with her working in retail and raising her sibling as a single mom at Neiman Marcus.

A decade later, Wesley is arrested for computer hacking and has a sizable gambling debt. Stunned and feeling like a failure, Carlotta is attracted to Atlanta Police Detective Jack Terry whom she met when he investigated her brother. She next meets Jack when she becomes the prime suspect in Angela's murder. Not one to sit idly by, Carlotta begins her own brand of investigating even as Peter confesses and Jack thinks she is back with her former fiancé.

The BODY MOVERS is an engaging amateur sleuth tale with romantic and police procedural underpinnings. Carlotta holds the entertaining story line together as she intrepidly sets off to learn the truth, but seems to land in one misadventure after another; who could know that the Lenox Mall holds so much danger and excitement? Fans will appreciate her finding work for Jack and look forward to her next escapades as suddenly daddy has called for the first time since he deserted her.

Harriet Klausner

turned out to be a great read!
I almsot marked this a 4 because I was so mad at the first maybe 80 pages or so (couldn't stand her brother and her continuing to put her life on hold for the loser and also didn't like her being treated like lowlife by a former friend) but I'm glad I kept at this one because the brother though continually in one mess after another seems to be trying here and there and there was always something going on to keep the story moving. I think Bond usually writes romance (or that's what I've seen in the Blaze line but she's a new author for me and I've recently gotten several of her other books) but this really isn't a romance though there are sexual situations/innuendos here and there but not actual 'sex'. there are 3 men 'interested' in the the main character and one I don't think is worth the time of day though the other 2 I'd have a bit of trouble picking between...and the brother has the hots for his parole officer. Oh and this 'ends' with the current 'storyline' but also ends wtih the pickup/tension for the next book (andI've heard the 2ndbook ends the same way with something happening we have to wait a year for the sequel)..I don't particularly like that and since there are supposedly several of these to be done I hope she puts out at least 2 per year or I'll be reading these when I'm 50! overall a nice story once you get past the first few chapters and just relax and go with it!