THE SHOP ON HIDDEN LANE

The descendants of two warring psychic families work together to find their missing relatives.

Luke Wells is trying to locate his missing Uncle Deke when he makes two shocking discoveries at Deke’s remote mountain cabin. First, his psychic talents tell him that the cabin was the site of violent crime, and second that Deke has been living there with Bea Harper. The Wells and Harper families have been enemies for generations, ever since Luke’s great-grandfather Xavier Wells and Tobias Harper worked together on a project to design and build psychically powered weapons. Even though the two friends had a falling out, they bound their families together in a pact to keep their dangerous weapons from ever falling into the wrong hands. Now Luke reaches out to Sophy Harper to inspect the cabin with her psychic talents, which are uniquely suited to the problem—using a chime, she enters a trance state where she can read and reconstruct crime scenes. She can tell that someone was killed in the cabin though she isn’t sure who it was, and she has a vision of the killer. The clues send them (along with Luke’s charming and preternaturally observant dog, Bruce) to the Fool’s Gold Canyon Art Colony, a ritzy resort in Arizona. They pretend to be newlyweds, hoping to find Bea and Deke and learn more about who was murdered in the cabin. Instead, they discover the art colony is a front to rebuild the psychic weapons their families are duty-bound to protect. The characters and events of this novel build on the world developed in Krentz’s earlier Fogg Lake series; Luke and Sophy’s romance is very much a subplot, but their investigation of the strange events at the Fool’s Gold Art Colony is entertaining enough. The book explores interesting themes of trust, with both Sophy and Luke exploring how having been betrayed by former lovers has impacted them.

A paranormal romance on cruise control, steady but unexciting.