A Southern California Mystery: Book 4
Publication Date:Â October 20th 2020
There’s a shooter on the loose who keeps missing his target. But that doesn’t stop him from trying again…and again. It’s up to Corrie Locke, rookie lawyer and spunky sleuth, to find the gunman before he hits his mark, Assistant Deputy D.A. James Zachary, Corrie’s hunky and complicated frenemy.
When Corrie is stuck with more questions than answers, she enlists a team with various strengths, from weapons to cooking skills, to help her find the shooter. Her computer whiz boyfriend Michael is onboard. So is former security guard Veera. Toss in an over-the-hill informant and a couple of feuding celebrity chefs and Corrie’s got her very own A-Team. Okay, maybe it’s more like a B-Team.
Can Team Corrie hunt down the shooter before he scores a bulls-eye?
You’d think I’d know by now not to start in the middle of a series. This is book 4, and the characters and their relationships are well developed at this point. I could have used a little more background as I felt a bit lost in the beginning. The author jumped right in, and it took me a while to catch up. As with most series, the story itself stands on its own… it’s just those little things that round out the story that would have made more sense or been more fulfilling if I’d read the earlier books in the series.
So Corrie is our heroine. Her late father was a well-known PI, but she’s a lawyer who does some PI stuff on the side. In this case, she happens to be in a restaurant when there’s a shooting, and she jumps into action. She decides that she can’t leave the matter to the police and barrels into the mystery, stumbling around and basically gets lucky. She has her B-Team, as the blurb calls her friends, to support her efforts in solving the mystery. They add a lot of the comic relief in the story.
So, I have mixed feelings about this book. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. I have a feeling that if you’ve read the other books in the series, you’d probably enjoy this one more. I mean, I liked the concept, and I grew to like the characters, but the actual solving of the mystery was all over the place, and I was getting whiplash from it.
Would I read this author again? I don’t know. If I did, I’d definitely go start at the beginning of the series. Would I recommend the book? I think if you like a quirky cast of characters, this series might be for you.
Lida Sideris’ first stint after law school was a newbie lawyer’s dream: working as an entertainment attorney for a movie studio…kind of like her heroine, Corrie Locke, except without the homicides. Lida was one of two national winners of the Helen McCloy Mystery Writers of America Scholarship Award for her first book. She lives in the northern tip of Southern California with her family, rescue dogs and a flock of uppity chickens.
