INDIE DARLING

The author of The Professor (2023) and The Resemblance (2022) takes readers on a tour of Nashville.

Kelly Williams has big blond hair. She wears tight pencil skirts and heels. She loves Dolly Parton. And there’s something lurking in her past that motivates her desire to help other women. When the lead singer for Seraph and the Garden Snakes reaches out to Kelly, the private eye will do anything to protect this charismatic—and controversial—rising star from a stalker. But Sarah Owens has her own dark history, and Kelly can’t always be sure this haunted young woman is telling her the full truth. Set in Nashville’s music scene, this novel has all the basic elements of a fresh, intriguing mystery. Unfortunately, Nossett’s flat prose never brings the story to life. Consider this sentence about Kelly’s new client, Sarah: “This Friday, her band is headlining the River Amphitheater stage at NashFest—one of about two dozen music festivals the city will welcome this summer.” Nashville is a vibrant, glamorous town, and this reads as if it was lifted from Wikipedia or a particularly bland tourism brochure. Kelly herself is tedious company, self-satisfied and self-righteous. Her success as an investigator is built primarily on lucky guesses and a knowledge of forensics equivalent to that of anyone with a passing interest in true-crime podcasts or police procedurals. But even this hapless PI knows more than the cops working Sarah’s case. In one bit of dialogue, a detective sounds like he’s never seen gunshot wounds before, though he’s supposed to be a grizzled veteran. There’s a bit of flirtation between Kelly and the cute songwriter who becomes her sidekick, but this subplot goes nowhere and does nothing to liven up the narrative.

Music City’s glamour is dimmed by dull prose and an incompetent protagonist.