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Review

Cold Brew Corpse: A Coffee Lovers Mystery #2

by Brian Kenney

A mystery with all the right ingredients, in all the right proportions: compelling crime, eccentric characters, dishy police chief, fascinating location, and above all else, Lana Lewis, a quirky, smart, witty, and sarcastic protagonist. After getting laid off from her job as a journalist in Miami, Lana moved back to her hometown of Devil’s Beach, a barrier island north of the city, and opened Perkatory, a happening coffee shop. When Raina—who owns the hot yoga studio next door—goes missing, Lana dusts off her journalism creds and heads into the contentious, and gossip-ridden, world of yoga to cover the story for the local paper. But finding Raina takes a village, and Lana gets help from a wonderful cast, including her yoga-loving, hippie Dad—whose medical marijuana prescription is always filled—and Noah Garcia, the aforementioned police chief. Lana and Noah’s burgeoning relationship, despite plenty of professional conflict, is a strong element in the novel. But at the book’s heart is Lana, a complex character who’s recovering from a divorce, wary of romance, and uncertain about her career, yet with a great sense of humor. If I can’t spend the afternoon hanging out with Lana in Perkatory, then please get me the next volume in this series ASAP.

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Review

Find Me

by Henrietta Thornton

Hope Miller, as she’s known these days, is stuck in a legal no-man’s land. After she was found injured in a car crash, she never regained her memory, doesn’t know who she is, and has continued to live, for years, as a kind of foster daughter of a whole New Jersey town. Police pretend not to notice that she’s driving without a license. She works cash jobs. And her best friend, defense lawyer Lindsay Kelly, who found Hope in the wreck of her car all those years ago, carefully tends to her friend’s safety. Lindsay tries to understand when Hope moves to the Hamptons and asks for no contact for a while, but she’s frantic when the vulnerable woman disappears from the Hamptons home. Looking for Hope, and trying to remain loyal to her while uncovering disturbing truths, has Lindsay examining the case of an already-captured serial killer who stalked women a thousand miles from New York decades before. She’s assisted in the investigation by gutsy NYPD detective Ellie Hatcher, whom readers will know from the previous five books in this series. Also familiar will be Burke’s talent at gripping storytelling, creating thought-provoking characters that make readers squirm with ambivalence, and oh-so-clever endings. There’s no need to read the other books to follow this one, but you’ll want to.

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Review

48 Hours to Kill

by Brian Kenney

A gripping thriller that is begging to be made into a motion picture. Ethan Lockhart, serving time in a Nevada jail for armed robbery, is released on a 48 hour furlough to attend the funeral of his younger sister, Abby. Ethan is devastated—he and Abby were super tight—but he’s also suspicious: his sister Abby was clearly assaulted in her home, but her body was never found. Ethan suspects Shark, his former boss, a one-time minor loan shark who’s now a major Reno crime boss. Ethan teams up with Abby’s best friend, Whitney—sparks fly!—and they descend into the criminal underground he had hoped to have left behind. The plot never wavers, and the few subplots all add to the story. Bourelle really cranks up the pace—the book just flies—and each chapter is ingeniously named after how many hours are left before Ethan needs to turn himself in. Netflix, please get on this!

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Review

The Village

by Brian Kenney

Every few weeks I get a hankering to visit the scariest place on earth: A British country village. And this standalone from Caroline Mitchell—the author of several series, including DI Amy Winters—more than does the trick. Naomi, a London journalist, is making the move to the rural village of Nighbrook along with her new husband, Ed, a filmmaker; and Ed’s daughter Morgan, the teenager from hell. Except Naomi has a secret. She’s long been obsessed with the story of the infamous Harper family, the members of which mysteriously disappeared from their Nighbrook cottage a decade ago, leaving the TV on, the stove ready for a batch of cookies, and no sign of a struggle. Now, not only is Naomi moving her family to Nighbrook but she’s bought Ivy Cottage, the Harper family’s old home, which has been empty this past decade. No one in her family knows its background, but what, after all, can go wrong? Let’s start with the villagers, who could teach a master class in glaring and whispering, and are united in withholding all information. Add to this the police who are in cahoots with the villagers, creeps from the Internet, a dangerous snowstorm, and so much more. Naomi will be lucky if she can get her family out alive, while readers will be happy to read this book in one, terrified, sitting.

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Review

The Lightning Rod

by Henrietta Thornton

Meltzer, Brad. The Lightning Rod (A Zig and Nola Novel #2). March 2022. 432p. William Morrow.
The intriguing setting here is life around Dover Air Force Base’s mortuary, where fallen soldiers are prepared for burial. In the opening title in this series, Escape Artist, Dover mortician “Zig” Zigarowski helped the Army’s Artist-in-Residence, Nola Brown, who was on the run. Now, Nola, a master at sabotaging the military’s plans for her, clandestinely attends a funeral at Dover, and the action revs back up. Meltzer’s thrilling plot veers from flashbacks to Nola’s dangerous childhood to glimpses inside the military’s orchestration of public knowledge about threats to our lives. Meltzer’s talent for detail makes even idle moments leap to life. While Nola waits for a computer program to load, a gust of wind rolls a beer can into a shopping cart that’s on its side; a nurse who encountered Nola has a necklace with a charm for each of her children, all boys. These mundane moments also highlight the casual viciousness that faces characters at every turn. Personalities, too, offer extreme contrasts: Zig prides himself on having done a loving job with the care of dead soldiers, while his foes care for nobody and stop at nothing to win. Fans of military thrillers should clear a weekend for this; it’s gripping.

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Review

Like a Sister

by Henrietta Thornton

From the outside, Desiree Pierce had it all. Famous hip-hop producer father, starring role on a rich-kid reality show, a huge audience following her every diamond-studded move on Instagram. But her sister, Melina, or Lena, has waited years for the phone call saying that drugs have finally killed Desiree, and that moment is here. Fed up as she is with donning her metaphorical Super Black Woman cape, Lena drags it on, again, to start picking up the pieces. But the background to Desiree’s supposedly accidental death starts to look off. For starters, she was terrified of needles and never would have injected heroin like the police say. And what was she doing in Lena’s residential Bronx neighborhood, miles from her glitzy lifestyle? Lena’s fast-paced investigation of what she believes to be a murder takes her back to painful episodes with her family, a clan tight-knit enough to care deeply about one another but that at the same time can get exasperated to the point of estrangement. Twists combine with deft writing and compelling characters—especially the relatable Lena—to create a memorable novel that’s perfect for those who like tales of flawed love and strong women.

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Review

Nine Lives

by Brian Kenney

Nine people receive an envelope in the mail that contains one piece of paper, a list, with just nine names on it, including their own. They don’t know each other, live all over the country, and, superficially at least, have nothing in common. The group includes a musician, an aspiring actor, an oncology nurse, and an FBI agent. Most pay the letter scant attention—a chance occurrence, perhaps?—and toss it aside. Then, one by one, they are murdered, often in the most extraordinary of ways. This sort of over-the-top plotting can seem completely unrealistic or completely suck you in, and in Swanson’s talented hands, it’s the latter. The author alternates the chapters among the potential victims, but does so with such deftness we never lose track of who’s who. And despite the many characters and locales, this book doesn’t have an ounce of fat on it—every fact and every detail adds to the story, propelling it forward. Unlike many suspense novels that slam into the conclusion, we discover our murderer gradually and the poignant back story emerges slowly. For fans of Jo Nesbø and Tess Gerritsen.

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Review

The Bloodless Boy

by Henrietta Thornton

“Life owns a way of disappointing most,” notes a character in Lloyd’s meticulously written and researched debut, in which murder is hot on the heels of the disappointments. One of the killings is the goriest I’ve ever read: brace yourself for a man having his Adam’s apple bitten out, with the gruesome fruit spat out to roll across the floor. And that’s only a minor character, one of those enmeshed in the politics swirling through London’s grimy, cold winter of 1678, when paranoia about Catholic plots to kill the King and turn the populace toward popery abounds. A light in the gloom is real-life polymath Robert Hooke, who leaves his elaboratory experiments to investigate the murder of the book’s titular boy. The child is found with his blood entirely removed, dates written beside various wounds on his body, and a coded message left on his chest. Once Hooke’s newly invented means of creating a vacuum in a jar is employed to preserve the body, the sleuthing is afoot. London of the day is almost its own character here, with Lloyd shoving readers into the chill, stink, and fear for a wonderfully atmospheric time. Try this if you enjoyed Cathedral of the Sea by Ildefonso Falcones, which illuminates the same era, but in Barcelona

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Review

Body and Soul Food

by Henrietta Thornton

What’s better than a bookstore? Hardly anything, unless it’s a bookstore with a fabulous soul-food café, the business venture, and adventure, embarked on here by twins Koby Hill and Keaton Rutledge. The two are just getting to know each other, having been raised apart when Koby was put in foster care and Keaton adopted. Many twins in popular culture are portrayed as either freakishly similar or freakishly different, not that I’m bitter as a twin or anything, but these are regular siblings who get along while tiptoeing around their new relationship. Koby is protective of his sister and nervous that the flirting going on between Keaton and his best friend, Reef, will turn to more, a fear that ends when Keaton finds Reef dead on the subway. Reef knew he was in danger, it seems, and left his friend a legacy that leads the twins on a well-plotted quest for justice that’s filled with the quirky characters and yummy-food references readers expect in a cozy. I wished for recipes at the end, and those will be in the book when it’s released. After that, you can look forward to more books about Koby and Keaton, as this is the first in a new series. Collette’s (aka Abby L. Vandiver) work is sure to appeal to fans of Cleo Coyle’s Coffeehouse Mystery series, the Singaporean Mystery series by Ovidia Yu, and Mia P. Manansala’s Arsenic and Adobo.

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Review

Catch Her When She Falls

by Brian Kenney

After college and a stint in Chicago, Micah Wilkes returns to her hometown of Calvary, PA. She ends up settling down with Ryan, a former high-school classmate, and opens Stomping Grounds, a coffee shop. All is well, except Micah can’t quite get past the murder of Emily, her best friend back in high school, especially since the murderer was Alex, Micah’s boyfriend, who’s now in jail. Then Micah receives a threatening text—“It should have been you, not Emily”—which propels her into the past, and slowly her well-constructed world starts to crack. She gets drawn into true-crime blogs and forums that rehash the murder and speculate about Micah’s motives. Her house is broken into, and remnants of Emily’s diary are left behind. Ryan, it turns out, has been in touch with Alex this whole time, visiting him in jail. No matter which way she turns, something or someone pops up, forcing her to question the night Emily was murdered, her own role in the crime, and who could have murdered her friend. In the end, Micah—totally unhinged—heads off to confront the one person who can help her understand that night ten years ago. A real slow burn, this book will please readers who appreciate deep character development, little violence, and plenty of suspense.

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