HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

A woman with secrets struggles to lead a normal life.

Kate Weller's brother, Liam, is in prison for bank robbery, and his associates have threatened Kate in an attempt to keep him quiet. She's trying to outrun her brother's checkered past by becoming an itinerant private eye. Though her boss, Nate Price, has given her the opportunity to move from Savannah to other cities to work on new cases, her past keeps catching up to her. On her way to a party given by a fellow detective's client, Kate is run off the road and her car’s pushed into a creek. So she’s happy to move on to a new job in Charleston as Jill Wyatt, who’s charged with tracking down a woman named Emma, whose biological sister, Charlotte Sugarman, will die without a liver transplant and whose last hope is to track down the sister she's never met; both women were adopted at birth by different families. Kate, or Jill, rents an apartment over the Italian restaurant owned by the gregarious Manfredi family and finds herself attracted to Eric Manfredi, a hunk who can cook like an angel. She draws closer to them when someone trashes their dumpster, Eric’s father is robbed, and the restaurant is damaged by a mysterious fire. When Eric’s father is arrested for the murder of his archrival, Salvatore Borelli, she vows to help. Despite her preoccupation with the Manfredis’ problems, she manages to find Emma. But she’s ambivalent about her involvement when she learns that Emma is a Christian Scientist whose faith forbids medical intervention. As she confronts her problems, she works both cases and finds herself in unexpected danger.

Ellis (Midnight On The Mississippi, 2015, etc.) introduces a new series with a pleasant, unexciting kickoff that’s more romance than mystery.