TATTOOED TO DEATH

A second round of mildly murderous intrigue for University of Seattle Hospital barista/vlogger Mandy Meadows and her friends and relations.

For better or worse, Reese O’Leary-Sett, the Irish Bengali nurse who’s Mandy’s neighbor and fellow vlogger, has precious little chance to execrate the terrible chair massage she received from therapist Coral Le Charme before Mandy finds the perpetrator stabbed to death next to a dumpster in the hospital’s parking garage. Since Coral's husband, Tom DeRoy, is a bladesmith who’s rumored to have beaten her, he’s the obvious suspect. To Mandy’s distress, however, her lodger, Seattle homicide detective Justin Ahola, passes over Tom and arrests Reese, who after all really did complain about that massage. The stage would be set for Mandy to move into full sleuthing mode if her plate weren’t already full. Her enduringly immature ex-husband’s failure to pay child support has forced her to work two jobs, and a year after her divorce became final, she suddenly finds herself subject to romantic advances from three unlikely men, none of them welcome, while Vellum, her 15-year-old daughter and partner in teaching clients to document their lives in online journals, is pursued by a suitor Mandy finds downright creepy. Unsavory secrets do eventually come to light, but Mandy’s entirely too busy with other matters to unearth them herself, and Redmond is clearly more invested in subjecting her heroine to amatory advances than developing her detective chops.

Nice enough, but the heroine is both seriously overworked and not up to much.