RANDOM ROAD

A hard-living newspaperwoman juggles multiple men and battles the bottle on her way to redemption via a high-profile murder story.

Punching a cop lands Sheffield Post reporter Geneva Chase on probation, with mandatory attendance at AA meetings as a chaser. But a grisly multiple murder at wealthy George and Lynette Chadwick’s home on the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound might be Genie’s ticket to redemption. The Chadwick homicides aren’t the only high-profile crime stories on her radar. She’s also following the case of Jimmy Fitzgerald, a spoiled rich kid recently arrested for murder and, in the view of Genie’s tart first-person narrative, a sociopath. Meantime, an unexpected upsurge in her love life challenges her resolve to keep her sobriety and her eye on the journalistic ball. When she runs into childhood pal Kevin Bell at an AA meeting, she finds herself drawn to his adorable awkwardness. And out of the blue, her hot ex Frank Mancini calls, wanting to rekindle a romance she’d thought was dead. As she ricochets from Frank to Kevin, Genie also toils in the trenches on various stories. She gets injured by a burglar in a HumVee while tracking a series of local robberies and gingerly explores the discreet local S&M scene’s ties to those murders. Her research on this big crime includes the history of the house and the lives of the victims.

Though the heroine’s love life may be less interesting to mystery fans than her amateur sleuthing, Kies’ fiction debut lays the groundwork for an entertaining series.