APRIL STORM

When she realizes she’s being watched, a suburban Colorado housewife finds her orderly life upended.

Texas author Meacham began writing novels in retirement; this last was completed before her death in 2021 at age 83. Her heroine, Kathryn Walker, is the put-together, 40-something wife of a successful orthopedic surgeon; both have come a long way from their impoverished, almost Dickensian backgrounds. Now their daughter is at college in Boulder and their son is a teacher in Houston, so Kathryn spends her time on volunteer work and fancy meals. One day she realizes she’s being followed by a man she assumes is a stalker, though the reader knows “Golf Cap” is a private investigator, as does Mike McCoy, a local rancher who’s a former member of the military’s Special Forces. In reaction to the murder of his pregnant wife decades earlier, McCoy now puts his bad-guy-fighting skills to use as a good Samaritan whenever he can. Though Kathryn’s husband doesn’t seem to take her situation seriously—he has financial troubles, demands at work, and may even be having an affair—when another library volunteer with blond hair and a Burberry raincoat is the victim of a hit-and-run, McCoy agrees with Kathryn that someone is trying to kill her. The search for who and why eschews both realism and subtlety, but Meacham’s fans, who have been eagerly waiting for her husband and her publisher to see her final manuscript though to publication, won’t care. What may be lacking in emotional veracity or prose style is made up for by the carefully laid-out plot and its satisfying (and feminist!) resolution.

A boldly imagined mystery with twists that are delightful if not overly believable.