FAMILY SKELETONS

Preparing her family home for sale, a San Francisco realtor faces painful old memories and surprising new opportunities.

Sunny Corday’s life hasn’t always lived up to the promise of her nickname. After her father left and tried to disown her, then disappeared, the angry teenager turned to pills for comfort. Her strong-willed mother Roberta managed to get her first marriage annulled; Sunny was only 16 and her 18-year-old husband was as drug-addled as she. Even rehab didn’t help much. Sunny may have been straight, but she headed right for a disastrous second marriage that landed her in the hospital. Now single, clean and living with Ryan, her best friend from high school, a psychologist in a stable relationship with personal trainer Marcus, Sunny is ready to tackle the task of cleaning out the beachfront Victorian her father grudgingly left her. She’s shocked to find that she has a companion in her work; now that Franklin Corday has been legally declared dead, a distant cousin Jonathan turns up to claim his piece of the Corday legacy. The fussy, proper ophthalmologist is an unlikely partner for uninhibited Sunny, but his kindness and concern (and some impressive physical endowments) win her over. And a good thing they do, since Sunny’s going to need all the help she can get coping with the grisly discoveries of a bloodied bat in the attic and a skeleton-corpse in the sand.

O’Keefe (Second Thoughts, 2009) straddles the fence nicely between mystery and romance, keeping the relationship in the forefront but incorporating a genuine puzzle.