Louisiana Fever by D. J. Donaldson

Hello again everyone! I hope you are having a happy Monday, I know I am possibly having one. (Inide joke). This week I read Louisiana Fever, which I found out after reading it that it was the fifth book in the series... whoops! Oh well, it happens from time to time, but it doesn't mean I still didn't understand the story. Thankfully the author was able to explain everything so well that I didn't realize it wasn't the first book until I took a better look at the description. And because of this, I am doing a review on this book despite where it sits on the list.

Meet Kit, a detective in Louisiana who is currently house sitting a large mansion for a friend of her boyfriends who is out of the country for a year. But things are stirring up in her life when she starts receiving gifts and roses from an unknown sender. 
When he invites her to meet him she is more than a little curious. But when she arrives to meet him she finds an older man waiting for her, who says only her name before collapsing and dying at her feet.
What seems like a random and sudden death might not be so simple though, as she and her coworker find that something more might be at work. And when I say something more, I mean at a pandemic level.
Chief medical examiner Andy Broussard is looking into the death of Kit's admirer when he finds out that his death might not have been a heart attack, but a disease that he can't name or understand. And when his assistant suddenly becomes sick as well he is fighting to find out what is going on as the body count begins to rise.
But nothing is as simple as solving one mystery. Suddenly Kit fails to show up for work and has not been seen by anyone for twenty four hours. Uh-Oh...
Broussard will have to balance solving both mysteries while trying to figure out what means more to him, his friends or his people. Neither is an easy case to solve for a medical examiner, even one as talented as himself. 
Kit has enough on her hands without the problem of an unknown disease on her mind. Dealing with her kidnappers is enough for her, but now she has one more problem on her hands while dealing with everything else.
Want to know what is going to happen to Kit and Broussard? Well get the book then and read it for yourself!

I was hoping that this book would have a good balance of mystery, pandemic, and science so that I didn't feel stupid reading it. And I have to say the book didn't disappoint me. There was mystery, science, and all the diseased details that I was hoping for going into it and that made me pretty satisfied with the story. 
The characters were well developed despite the fact that this book was already the fifth in the series. I enjoyed the way people were played and how they managed to keep the same type of personality without suddenly changing halfway through the story.
The one thing I found I had trouble dealing with was how stupid Kit could be at some points, like how she constantly said smart ass things to piss off the kidnappers, but I understood that as a detective she knew what she was doing. I will overlook it because it wasn't that big a deal and because it was the only complaint I really had.
I would rate this book a FOUR out of FIVE stars. I would certainly recommend reading this is you have a love of science, mystery, romance, or outbreak stories. And I send out a thanks to the author for sending me a copy to read, it was a great read and was certainly worth it.
So that's all I have for today! Have a great week and I will see you all on Friday (unless I have another surprise for you this week...)
Read on and watch for paper cuts!
- K