Parker Valentine is about to realize her dream of opening her own winery in her hometown of Boulder, Colorado. Sure her parents don’t seem enthused enough to drop in on opening day, but at least her brother Liam and his good-looking friend Reid Wallace are there to show their support—along with a decent-sized crowd of…
In the third Santero and Rein thriller, Bernard Schaffer reunites detective Carrie Santero with manhunter Jacob Rein—to plumb the depths of a madman’s obsession… There’s just something so meaty and delectable about Bernard Schaffer’s writing. Every book of his goes down so quickly, leaving me feeling entirely sated. Blood Angel, the third in his terrific…
The Fire Thief by Debra Bokur is the first book in the new Dark Paradise Mystery series featuring Detective Kali Māhoe, where the Maui scenery may be beautiful, but dangerous secrets are buried beneath paradise. Oh, to be on gorgeous Maui in times like these—especially if you live in an area where the weather is…
Eight months have passed since the events of the last installment of the Kebab Kitchen Mystery series, with nary a dead body in sight—to the relief of our heroine, Lucy Berberian. She’s had her hands full running her family’s Mediterranean restaurant, so everything else has been on the backburner, including looking for a new apartment…
The Own Voices debut novel of Abby Collette’s Ice Cream Parlor mystery series is a breath of fresh air, featuring an African-American store owner who’s reluctantly drawn into solving a murder mystery after she discovers a dead body. Bronwyn “Win” Crewse moved home to Chagrin Falls, just outside Cleveland, Ohio, after a health scare reminded…
The third in the Kebab Kitchen Mystery series is another page-turning culinary cozy, as summer festivities in Ocean Crest, New Jersey, are interrupted by murder. Our heroine, Lucy Berberian, is the manager of her family’s Mediterranean restaurant but has taken on the task of helping to organize the food and beverage portion of Ocean Crest’s…
The Poison Flood by Jordan Farmer is the gritty story of a reclusive musician and the environmental disaster that threatens his small town and changes his life forever. I’ve been fortunate in recent weeks to read and review several outstanding novels that place a spotlight on underrepresented communities in American fiction. To the examination of…
A Fatal Finale by Kathleen Marple Kalb is the first entry in the new Ella Shane Mystery series, where the opera singer is determined to decode the dark secrets surrounding her co-star’s fatal finale before the lights go dark and the culprit appears for an encore. In turn-of-the-20th-century New York City, Ella Shane is the…
Charlotte “Charlie” Cooke has been running the Bear Claw Diner in Elkview, Alaska, for over a year now after her mother, the diner’s original owner-operator, decided she wanted to retire and travel the world with her husband, Charlie’s dad. Now that Charlie’s settled into a good groove with both the diner and her cat—the delightfully…
In a dystopian near-future America, Elena Fischer Fairchild is one of those upper-middle-class women who are only too happy to be complicit in an unjust system of government until her own interests are affected. The system in question is one she helped devise as a teenager with her then-boyfriend Malcolm Fairchild. Somehow, they managed to…
