🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2
A smartly sassy ride-along with an awesome new female Private Investigator, Fati Rizvi, – a coffee-loving, bear-spray-armed, no-holds-barred powerhouse, with a healthy disregard for all things pink and sparkly, as well as pretty much all authority and convention.
Based in Lake Templeton, a fictional small lakeside community in the gorgeous setting of Vancouver Island, Canada, – when a victim is found washed up on a pristine beach, Private Investigator Fati and her resources are called in to assist the overworked and frazzled local police department.
If it wasn’t for the underlying tone of corruption and menace (after all, this is a murder mystery), you’d be tempted to call this story gossipy, – with its briskly hopping pace, shifting focus from character to character, revealing secrets in a lively and compelling patter, all adding up to a crisis-crossing and crazy web of lies, foibles and deceit – ordinary lives buried amongst those slowly revealing themselves as criminal.
As the case increases in complexity, it becomes abundantly clear that solving this puzzle will require a whip-sharp mind, both for Fati and her crew, and for the reader (in keeping up with this rapidly expanding plot-line).
I loved this book, beginning with the wonderfully-crafted Fati (a new favorite female lead), and extending to her strange and talented underground web of colleagues, – including, but not limited to, Zed, a pierced and tattooed mentee PI with the eagerness of a puppy, blended with the street-smart talents of a snake-charmer (albeit a nice one).
And then of course, there is Detective Talvir Singh – Fati’s newly-attached partner, a fascinating and hormone-inducing homicide detective, whose introduction to the team cannot help but ratchet-up the crime-solving prowess (as well as, undoubtedly, Fati’s heartbeat).
Great fun to read, this is a wonderfully-engaging new start in a promising crime series. I can’t wait to read more of Fati and her casework.
My stop today on the @rararesources #blogtour for #TheLakeTempletonMurders by @HSBurney.
A great big thank you to the author and the publishers for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.
