🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Cleverly plotted, this fun (and often funny) detective story has an intriguing twist — the story focuses mostly on our trio of detectives themselves, and their backstories, with the crimes they are to solve an added “bonus” mystery for the reader.

Based in Edgar Mills (fictional small-town Massachusetts), in this dual timeline novel there are actually two sets of crimes to be solved — those committed in the year 2000, and those in our current day, twenty-five years later. The literary hook here is that the detectives themselves — infamous teen detective-wannabes in our first timeline, and legendary, middle-aged try-agains in the second — bring a cartload of baggage along across timelines, which the reader is left to furiously unpack.

It’s the year 2000, and a rash of serial murders has brash seventeen-year old Samantha, and her gentle-natured twin Alice desperate to claim a role as infamous teen detectives — riding on the coat-tails of their much-adored cop father.

In the same timeline, teenage IT nerd Joey, a Boy Wonder at the coding keyboard, finds solving the trails left by crimes may be a claim to fame he can proud of.

Twenty-five years later, the picture has changed, as a new rash of murders In Edgar Mills forces our heros to re-examine their past, manage middle-life and its incessant demands, and gear up for a modern-day serial killer hunt that will prove to be much darker, deadlier, and as brutal and complex as a mind can dream up.

A terrific read, peppered with colorful small-town characters who come alive, straight off the page, in a plot so fluid and visual it screams for tv adaptation. I loved this book, and loved this trio, and (no spoilers here) for this reader, (I have a hunch), further visits to Edgar Mills could be an absolute hoot.

A great big thank you to the author and the publisher Simon & Schuster for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.