HARLEY JANE KOZAK – A Date You Can’t Refuse. Broadway, trade paperback original, March 2009.

   At one time a greeting card designer, Wollie Shelley currently makes her living as a professional dater. But along with this switch in career paths, she has somehow managed to find herself mixed up in several cases of murder as well.

   In this, the fourth and final book in the series, Wollie finds herself working for a media training firm, teaching American social conventions to Eastern Europeans — in essence, dating them. It turns out her reality shows were huge hits in Belarus and vicinity, so she’s a bit of a celebrity to the clientele.

   She also happens to be informing to the FBI, because they think something is up with the vaguely cultish company — maybe arms dealing. However, the FBI isn’t very forthcoming, and her FBI agent boyfriend is involved in his own undercover investigation.

   Anyway, it turns out more than one thing is up. As usual in this series, there are a lot of ingredients in the soup, including murder, DVD piracy, bad mobile phone reception and a sidewalk chalk art competition. Wollie realizes her predecessor at the media training firm was murdered. When that young woman’s boyfriend is also killed, Wollie gets serious about investigating and lands in real danger.

   Anyone who hasn’t read the previous books might find the subplots related to Wollie’s brother, uncle and friends a bit unclear, but that won’t spoil the book. And I won’t spoil the ending to the series, one of my favorites, except to say that it seems like a happy one.

The Wollie Shelley mystery series —

       1. Dating Dead Men (2004)

       2. Dating Is Murder (2005)
       3. Dead Ex (2007)
       4. A Date You Can’t Refuse (2009)