This book has one of the best opening paragraphs I’ve read in a long time:

The first time I came to Deadwood, I got shot in the ass. Now, twenty-five years later, as I stared into the double barrels of Old Man Harvey’s shotgun, irony was having a fiesta and I was the piñata.

I suspected I didn’t have to read the rest of the sample to discover I was going to enjoy this book but, having been burned by a great sample recently, I read it anyway. And then downloaded the book. And then read it and downloaded samples of the other books in the series.¹

Violet Parker, a single mother of fraternal twins (one girl, one boy), has relocated to the town of Deadwood for a new start. Her cool aunt has taken her in and watches the kids during the day, while Violet tries to save her job as a realtor by selling one house – any house – within the next three weeks. She’s actually at Old Man Harvey’s because he told her boss that he wanted to list his house. The old coot is harmless but lonely for something other than his overactive sex life, and writes a “dinner together once a week until the house is sold” clause into his listing. That’s okay, in a pinch, he fills in as a babysitter evenings while Violet’s aunt is working at her gallery and Violet is on a date with one of the three – or is it four – suitors that are pursuing her. Each with surprises of his own.

Violet just hopes that none of those surprises is serial killing because someone has been kidnapping adorable little blonde girls just like her daughter, a child who – between a one-girl campaign to marry her mother off that includes placing a personal in the paper and adopting every stray animal and rescuing a not so stray chicken – sets up a roadside stand in front of the house, unsupervised, and accepts candy from strangers. Male strangers. With weird eyes.

Aside from the fact that I suspected the killer the first time he was introduced – and sussed his motive when he took her on a listing tour of his house – this book had enough red herrings to keep me guessing. The plot was unflaggingly fast-moving, keeping me up most of the night to finish it, and the characters fun to read about. The dialogue is realistic and very silly. A fine blend of mystery with a hint of the supernatural (what the heck is in that cave out behind Old Man Harvey’s barn, anyway?), and romantic, with a lot of steam between Violet and one of her four suspects/suitors.

My only complaint is that it is the first of a series and now I want to read the rest of the series. They are cheap though, especially for eBooks. And they’re fast reads, so I could probably knock them all off on the plane home.

Perhaps more to come on this author…

1. This publisher was brilliant, making it really easy to download samples of the author’s other books in the series without going back to the shop part of the app. Who is the publisher…? OMG she’s self-published! How is this author stuck in self-publishing when others of lesser quality get picked up by major publishers? It’s a mystery to me. Maybe because she’s a mélange of genres, a little mystery, a little ghosty, a little romance… ↩︎