Book Review: Over Her Dead Body | Kate White | Bailey Weggins #4

Back at it with my Kate White spotlight series, with my review of Over Her Dead Body, the fourth installment in the Bailey Weggins series. To backtrack, I’ve been doing a re-read of all of Kate White’s books. She is one of my all-time favorite authors, and her books are my number one go-to when I’m in a slump and I want to escape into a fantastic, gripping book! Kate White is the former editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, so you can imagine that any mystery written by her is going to be filled with the salacious tidbits, rich description, and those gutsy girl modern feminists that I’m not alone in celebrating!

Baily Weggins is a true crime writer for Gloss magazine who has a knack for stumbling across dead bodies, and puts her best modern Nancy Drew to the test when helping to solve them! In Over Her Dead Body, we see Bailey forced to consider a new career path when her friend and editor Cat informs her that she is taking Gloss in a new direction, one that includes less true crime and more feng shui. With another smart and intricate mystery, and the same loveable Bailey at the center, I found the fourth book to be just exactly the perfect getaway read this week!

About the Book | Over Her Dead Body

New York Times bestselling author and former Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Kate White knows firsthand that the magazine business is murder.

The smart and gutsy crime writer Bailey Weggins returns for a case set against the glossy pages of a celebrity rag where somebody is about to give Bailey’s new boss a lethal deadline. Talk about rapid turnover-in a matter of days Bailey Weggins gets axed from one New York magazine and hired by another. Her new job at Buzz, a weekly filled with sizzling gossip, has Bailey covering celebrity crime, including the starlet who got caught stuffing Fendi purses down her pants and the aging hunk who shot his lover with a Magnum.

Bailey doesn’t have to look far for her next story: she finds her boss, Mona Hodges, gasping her last breath after being bludgeoned with a blunt object. A raging tyrant, Mona made Buzz a top ‘zine but racked up an impressive list of enemies along the way. Everyone from a chubby singer she dubbed “Fat Chance” to a mail guy she once reamed out would be glad to see Mona six feet under. And Bailey Weggins intends to get the scoop on whodunit even though one of her closest friends is at the top of the suspects list.

With her strappy sandals in one hand and her cell phone in the other, Bailey’s out hunting for clues everywhere from the mean streets of Brooklyn’s Little Odessa to a posh company picnic in the Hamptons. In just about a New York minute she’s got a crush on a sexy filmmaker-and some scary insight into her boss’s murder. The first can give her the hot summer fling she’s itching to have. The second can get her killed…

Review | Over Her Dead Body

Bailey finds herself in a time of transition in this book. She’s broken up with the man in her life, she is out of her regular job, and she is forced into carving a new path for herself forward. I admit, I remember how shocked I was to hear long-time friend and boss Cat change the direction for Gloss magazine to a direction that doesn’t include true crime writing or human interest stories. But thankfully, an opportunity arises at just the right moment at Buzz—a weekly magazine filled with all things celebrity, including celebrity crime covered by none other than the incredible Bailey Weggins!

Bailey’s new boss Mona is no picnic to work for—Bailey herself witnesses a dressing down or four, but manages to escape the wrath of Mona largely due to her background as a “respectable” writer. Still, no one is exactly devastated when Mona turns up murdered, the body discovered by none other than Bailey. I have to say that on a re-read, I was quite fascinated by Mona. Her methods were severe and frankly inappropriate, but she also seemed to be great at her job. She’s quite the figure!

Bailey also finds herself interested in someone new, and there’s actually this incredibly humorous sequence where Bailey wants to find out his name and fakes a call to the place she met him to trick it out of the receptionist. This is the Bailey I love! She is imperfectly adorable—doing something many of us would do because she saw a cute guy and couldn’t stop thinking about him! It was interesting seeing Bailey vulnerable—liking someone more than she realized, and maybe more than she was ready for, while also being insecure about the level of reciprocation from him.

This entire book is a fresh start for Bailey in a way! New career, new love interest. Bailey is at the most vulnerable in life that we have seen her, and it added a new layer to her character that really pulled me in. This Bailey is no less fierce than in the previous books, but she is also humbled by life, insecure at times, but still her gutsy-girl self that I’ve come to love! I loved when we got to see her have a particularly ballsy interaction with a difficult witness, and then hear that she was shaking a bit during it. It was so refreshingly normal and showed her true confidence in her vulnerability in a way.

I was caught AGAIN this re-read, sure that I knew who the culprit was and being wrong! I remembered bits of the ending but it tricked me again! This fun and sassy installment was just as amazing on a re-read, and I highly recommend it!