Intriguing and refreshing female characters enliven this mystery tale.
In Willis’ debut thriller, a seemingly meek retirement home resident handles unsavory types by using skills that she picked up during a career as a professional assassin.
In many ways, 84-year-old Hattie Rosales is like other residents at Shady Rest Retirement Home in Gethsemane, Illinois. However, she’s also a former hitwoman who doesn’t actually need the wheeled walker she uses, and when racist resident Dottie Tyler threatens to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement on a Guatemalan Shady Rest employee, Hattie decides to kill her. Periodic bits of backstory reveal that Hattie, as a young wife and mother, met Ludmilla “Milly” Netsurov at a Tupperware party in 1961. The two eventually turned the parties into a business called M&H, but they later earned the bulk of their profits from murder for hire, arranged by a man named Sid. In the present day, Hattie offs two more people, making the deaths look like accidents. This doesn’t stop police chief LaTasha Cranton from poking around Shady Rest. LaTasha recognizes Hattie’s sharp intelligence and accepts her advice on an active homicide case—the shotgun slaying of wealthy businessman Jack Mortensen. However, LaTasha also begins to suspect that Hattie had something to do with the recent Shady Rest demises, leading to a battle of wills between two savvy women. Willis’ novel showcases two multifaceted characters and provides parallels between them; although they’re on opposite sides of the law, Hattie and LaTasha, both people of color, have experienced sexism and racism throughout their lives. They’re also both exceedingly likable. (It helps, of course, that the people whom Hattie kills at Shady Rest aren’t remotely sympathetic.) Startling moments arise naturally, as in a scene in which Hattie cleans out a safe deposit box that’s filled with goodies from her former profession. Various mysteries creep into the narrative, involving the Mortensen investigation and Milly’s unexplained death years ago. The latter case is easy to figure out, but the book’s overall resolution offers a pleasant surprise.
Intriguing and refreshing female characters enliven this mystery tale.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-977209-25-2
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The romantic doings of the likable characters are more interesting than the mediocre mystery.
A bike shop owner and her book club pals keep solving mysteries in ways that somehow don’t endear them to the police (Murder on Cape Cod, 2018, etc.).
Mackenzie Almeida, the proprietor of Mac’s Bikes in the touristy Cape Cod town of Westham, is dating Tim Brunelle, the caring and handsome owner of an artisanal bakery, who wants to get married and start a family. That’s not something independent neat freak Mac is ready to do. She enjoys living in her tiny house with Belle, her talkative parrot, for company. When Mac and her best friend, Gin, come across the dead body of wealthy Beverly Ruchart outside Gin’s taffy shop, Mac’s romantic problems get put on the back burner, especially since Gin is a suspect. She and her date, Eli Tubin, the widower of Beverly’s daughter, had attended a party at Beverly’s home only the night before. Beverly seems to have died from a heart attack, but an autopsy finds that she was poisoned with antifreeze, some of which has been planted in Gin’s garage. Of course Mac and her cohorts at the book club can’t resist a little sleuthing. They uncover several other plausible suspects: Beverly’s ne’er-do-well grandson, Ron, his Russian girlfriend, and his long-absent father, who has a police record. Although Beverly could be generous, she had a sharp tongue that made her plenty of enemies. Her interest in genealogy and reuniting long-lost parents and children endeared her to Wesley Farnham, for whom she found a son, but not so much to Farnham’s daughter, who misses being an only child. Although Mac turns her findings over to the police, she still attracts the killer’s notice and ends up owing her life to Belle.
The romantic doings of the likable characters are more interesting than the mediocre mystery.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1508-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Shalvis’ latest retains her spark and sizzle.
Piper Manning is determined to sell her family’s property so she can leave her hometown behind, but when her siblings come back with life-changing secrets and her sexy neighbor begins to feel like “The One,” she might have to redo her to-do list.
As children, Piper and her younger siblings, Gavin and Winnie, were sent to live with their grandparents in Wildstone, California, from the Congo after one of Gavin’s friends was killed. Their parents were supposed to meet them later but never made it. Piper wound up being more of a parent than her grandparents, though: “In the end, Piper had done all the raising. It’d taken forever, but now, finally, her brother and sister were off living their own lives.” Piper, the queen of the bullet journal, plans to fix up the family’s lakeside property her grandparents left the three siblings when they died. Selling it will enable her to study to be a physician’s assistant as she’s always wanted. However, just as the goal seems in sight, Gavin and Winnie come home, ostensibly for Piper’s 30th birthday, and then never leave. Turns out, Piper’s brother and sister have recently managed to get into a couple buckets of trouble, and they need some time to reevaluate their options. They aren’t willing to share their problems with Piper, though they’ve been completely open with each other. And Winnie, who’s pregnant, has been very open with Piper’s neighbor Emmitt Reid and his visiting son, Camden, since the baby’s father is Cam’s younger brother, Rowan, who died a few months earlier in a car accident. Everyone has issues to navigate, made more complicated by Gavin and Winnie’s swearing Cam to secrecy just as he and Piper try—and fail—to ignore their attraction to each other. Shalvis keeps the physical and emotional tension high, though the siblings’ refusal to share with Piper becomes tedious and starts to feel childish.
Shalvis’ latest retains her spark and sizzle.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296139-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
