A new mystery, with headhunters

Nothing like a few headhunters to add dramatic tension to a story, is there?

"The Headhunter's Daughter," the second mystery in a series by Charlotte's Tamar Myers, is now in stores. It's the story of a white girl raised by a Belgian Congo headhunting tribe until she's 13, when a white police chief sets out to investigate rumors of the girl's existence.

Myers knows of what she writes. As the daughter of missionaries, she grew up in a diamond-mining town in the Congo, where she lived among headhunters.

Until she began her Congo series, Myers had published more than 30 comedic mysteries, one featuring a Mennonite innkeeper, the other an antiques dealer.

But it was the first book in this new series, "The Witch Doctor's Wife," that won a starred review in Publishers Weekly when it came out in 2009. "An engagingly devious yarn," Publishers Weekly calls her newest book, "but what truly elevates this effort is the warmth with which she evokes the now-vanished Congo where she spent much of her childhood."