Nerd Girl Loves Books

This is another great mystery focusing on Deputy Mattie Cobb. She and her sister travel to Mexico to visit her mother, but find her gone. She returns home to find a note on her door telling her to find “him” among the standing dead. The sheriff’s race to the forest and they find a dead man tied to a tree. Mattie knows the man, and when she finds another note telling her that her mother is in bad shape, Mattie knows she has to do whatever it takes to save her.

This is a pretty good epistolary mystery written exclusively as if reading a movie script. In December 2003, Luke Ryder, the stepfather of acclaimed filmmaker Guy Howard (then aged 10), was found dead in the garden of their suburban family home. Luke was babysitting Guy. Luke’s two teenage step-daughters found him dead in the back yard, while Guy slept in his room. The children’s mother was a suspect but she was at a party that night with a solid alibi. His murder remains unsolved.

This is book 11 of the Will Trent mystery/thriller series and it was great. This is the first book I’ve read in the series, but having watched the tv series, I didn’t feel lost reading it. Plus, there is enough backstory in the book to help the reader understand what is going on. The book can be read as a stand-alone mystery.

This is an entertaining contemporary mystery set in a bookstore in a small town in Pennsylvania. A few years ago five retired seniors in a writer’s group bought the town bookstore. Unable to secure a traditional loan, they obtained one with a large balloon payment. A flash flood caused significant foundation issues, eating up the store’s savings, and now they can’t make the balloon payment. While the partners struggle to come up with ideas to raise the funds, and cope with issues they’ve kept secret from the group, a thief systematically searches the bookstore and their homes for an old book someone is willing to pay $500K for.