A California Online Magazine with Local Focus and Global Appeal
Sammy Greene is a radio talk show host who has been invited to spend a summer in Greece with her old friend and his family, Gus Pappajohn. Gus is a retired cop who lives in Boston. Sammy currently lives in Los Angeles but is relocating to a new radio job in New York.
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Erin Gaines, her husband, and a couple of good, really best, friends start their own company. It features an app that helps users stick to their budget. As you pass a store, it will tell you what’s on sale, if it fits your allotted budget, and it keeps track of all your expenses and savings. A great way for college kids to live within their means, for adults to save for retirement, and for retirees to plan trips or gifts for the grandkids. The plan is to ride the app’s success for a few years, then sell to the highest bidder, retire as millionaires.
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It had been over a year, but the nightmares were back…visceral and terrifying. But it’s the vision, the hallucination, that was the most disturbing. Elizabeth has returned to her grandparent’s home in Cyprus, Mississippi, where she’d spent so many summers and met her very best friend, Loralie. But seven years ago Loralie had gone missing, and Elizabeth dismissed that the first vision of her beaten and bloodied friend was an illustration of her death.
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In True Fiction, bestselling thriller writer Ian Ludlow is on a book tour in Washington State when his life is turned upside down! Along for the thriller ride is Margo French, a dog walker and aspiring singer who had taken the job of driving Ian around to his events.
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For those of you who enjoy thrillers we have reviews of three of them for you this week-Fractured Truth: Bone Gap Travellers by Susan Furlong, Before It’s Too Late: FBI K-9 by Sara Driscoll, and Storm Rising: FBI K-9 by Sara Driscoll.
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Jonathan Grave is about the only guy who can take his girlfriend on a romantic vacation and end up saving the world as we know it. Jonathan and Gail are at the Crystal Sands Resort, a beautiful place where the staff anticipates your every desire.
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As Pride Month comes to an end, we at KRL have one more LGBTQ+ related mystery review to share! This one not only features a transgender main character, but is written by transgender author, Renee James.
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Freddie Venton considers herself a journalist, but she’s working in a coffee shop, writing for free. When she runs into a childhood friend, now a police officer, she follows her to a crime scene.
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It’s got to be a parent’s worst nightmare. Go out for an evening, leave the baby with a reliable sitter, and come home to find the sitter beaten and the baby missing. The parents are wealthy so a ransom demand is expected but never comes.
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Turning her attention away from the long-standing series featuring Decker and Lazarus, Faye Kellerman has written a standalone involving a serial killer and rapist, a teenager obsessed with finding the murderer, first love, and hanky-panky goings-on in high school. It makes for good reading throughout the rather bulky book.
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“Living in a country torn apart by a revolution gives you a different perspective on the lessons you learn in history class,” says Lizzie, the main protagonist in Karen Alkofer’s first novel, The Party Line. It’s a young adult novel with an insightful twist. In addition to providing an interesting story, this book also gives the reader a different perspective than the lessons you learn in history class.
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For readers who love Theodosia, Drayton, and Haley from the Tea Shop books, Carmela and Ava from the scrapbook series, and Suzanne, Petra, and Toni from the Cackleberry Club, this is a departure from the cozy mysteries you’re used to. Schmitt (Laura Childs’ real name) has turned to thrillers. Her first, Little Girl Gone, is about a kidnapped baby. Shadow Girl is the second, and it starts with a bang, literally.
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Meet PI Roxane Weary. She is dealing with her cop father’s recent death on the job by trying to drink herself into oblivion every day. As her bank account runs low, her brother sends her his friend who is trying to save her brother from execution. Fifteen years ago Brad Stockton’s beautiful blonde girlfriend, Sarah Cook, disappeared, and her parents were brutally murdered. No trace of her has been found since that night until Brad’s sister tells Roxane that she saw her at a neighborhood gas station and begs Roxane to try and find her and get her brother acquitted.
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Barry Lancet’s Japantown (2016) introduced readers to Asian art dealer/Japanese detective agency owner Jim Brodie and both his divergent firms—one in San Francisco, the other in Tokyo—readily making available a cornucopia of possible plots that could occur in the US or Japan, or both, and by no means restricted to either locale. Lancet followed this intriguing debut with Tokyo Kill (2015), in which a veteran Japanese soldier comes to Brodie in Tokyo, certain that his friends and former unit are systematically being murdered, putting a WWII twist to the plot and making readers wonder to what degree Japanese culture still labors under the weight of that particular history.
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