Sara Paretsky weaves the  pandemic and its complications into the plot of  her 21^st V.I. Warshawski thriller, Overboard, due out in May. Chicagoans are emerging from lockdown as everyone is trying to figure out how to stay safe, and private investigator Vic packs masks and hand sanitizer along with her lock picks and Smith & Wesson.

Alerted by her two dogs, Vic finds a teenage girl who seems near death hiding in the boulders along Lake Michigan. Conscious long enough to whisper one foreign word to Vic before the rescue squad arrives, the teen later disappears from the hospital after being interrogated by a policeman and a janitor who can speak Hungarian.

Vic takes off with her dog Mitch to find the girl again before she comes to harm. For some reason, the girl is a threat to crooks who will kill her once she gives them something they value. To complicate the action, Vic is dealing with another teen, Brad Litvak, who secures her services to figure out if his father Donny is in danger.

The plot becomes a tangle as Vic discovers Brad’s mother may be having an affair with one of the villains who is looking for the missing teen, now identified as Julia Zigler, while the girl’s own uncle Gus Zigler is trying to steal her inheritance. 

A belligerent cop with a history of brutality but no convictions figures into all this somehow. Vic clashes with him repeatedly as she works furiously putting all the puzzle pieces together to save Julia and help Brad’s family, all the while running the rest of her investigator business, which includes some pro bono work to help some friends save their Temple from vandals and a city inspector who wants to condemn the building. Seemingly, all these situations are linked as Vic puts her life on the line to find the connecting threads.

Sara Paretsky never disappoints with her multi-layered detective fiction. Kansas raised, Paretsky has been living in Chicago since 1968. She has a Ph.D. in history and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting March 20, 2022.

I would like to thank St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

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The Homewreckers by Mary Kay Andrews

 Mary Kay Andrews embraces the whole home-fixer-up genre on television as she releases her latest novel, a murder mystery called The Homewreckers, in May.

Hattie Kavanaugh flips houses for a living with her father-in-law’s company in Savannah, Georgia. Obsessed with the business, Hattie has little time for anything outside of her job. A widow, Hattie first refuses the proposition of Maurice Lopez, an executive producer of home improvement programs, to star in a series about flipping houses in her city called Saving Savannah.

However, Hattie changes her mind because a bad flip investment has put her finances in jeopardy. But what she thinks she is signing up for is not what Rebecca Sanzone, the head of the HPT network, has in mind: a show called The Homewreckers, combining a home improvement show and a dating program by bringing in hot decorator Trae Bartholomew to woo Hattie. What could possibly go wrong with switching up things for Hattie who does not suspect what is going on?

During Demo Day, Hattie’s best friend and foreman, Cassidy, finds a wallet between the walls in the bathroom of the house on Tybee Island they are flipping for the program.  The contents of the wallet reveal it belongs to Lanier Ragan, a woman who just disappeared 17 years ago leaving behind a husband and a young child. Coincidentally, that woman was Hattie and Cassidy’s high school English teacher. What will an investigation into a long-missing woman’s wallet do to the already tight timeline for The Homewreckers? What might this clue lead to in solving the mystery about what happened to Lanier?

Mary Kay Andrews  a pseudonym for Kathy Hogan Trocheck, is definitely one of my go-to authors for summer reads. A native of St. Petersburg, Florida, she started her professional journalism career in Savannah, Georgia, where she covered the real-life murder trials that were the basis of the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a non-fiction novel by John Berendt. A former journalist, Andrews has lived in Raleigh, North Carolina, but is currently residing in Atlanta and has her own hideaway on Tybee Island.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting March 18, 2022.

I would like to thank St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.