Author: Denise Grover Swank
Series: Darling Investigations (Book 1)
Publication: Montlake Romance (January 9, 2018)
Description: New York Times bestselling author Denise Grover Swank gives a former TV star one more shot at fame—and it proves to be a killer comeback…
Ten years ago, Summer Butler was television’s most popular teenage sleuth. Since then, she’s hit—what gossip sites just love to call—the gutter. Nearly bankrupt, betrayed, estranged from her greedy mother, and just about unemployable, she’s coaxed into that desperate haven for has-beens: reality TV.
Winging it as a faux PI, she’ll solve off-the-cuff mysteries in her hometown of Sweet Briar, Alabama. For added drama, there’s police chief Luke Montgomery, inconveniently Summer’s first and only love.
It’s when Summer stumbles upon a very real corpse that Darling Investigations takes an unexpected twist. The growing list of suspects is a big draw to viewers, but the reality is that Summer doesn’t know whom she can trust. Someone has written this killer new scene especially for her, and unless Summer gives the role everything she’s got, it could be her last…
My Thoughts: Summer Butler is a television star whose star has fallen. When she was a teen she played a teenage private eye whose signature line was "Gotcha." But ten years later she can't find a job, her manager mother ran off with all her earnings, and she is about to lose her house and lose the family farm. Salvation might be at hand if she is willing to go the route of reality TV...
Summer finds herself in her hometown of Sweet Briar, Alabama where her first boyfriend, and the only man she's ever loved, is now Chief of Police Luke Montgomery and the lady at the diner runs a Facebook page filled with local gossip. She is reunited with her cousin Dixie who is playing her assistant and the grandmother who disowned her when she couldn't leave her film site in Southeast Asia to attend the funerals of her grandfather, aunt and uncle when they died in a fire Dixie was convicted of causing.
Summer arrives to find that most of the cases that she will be working on for the show have been set up by her incredibly ambitious producer. The cases range from a missing person to finding out which neighborhood pooch impregnated another. She spends most of the time on the case of the missing man. Otto Olson drinks and going missing for a few days isn't unusual but his sister is concerned because he has now been missing for a week.
Summer, Dixie and their cameraman Bill are secretly trying to solve the case of Otto's disappearance even after the producer has made them move on to other cases. When they find Otto's body and the bodies of two other men, Summer knows that they might have bitten off a little more than they could chew. But despite Luke's orders to leave the investigation alone, Summer needs to prove herself.
This story had small town politics, drug deals, stalkers, family drama, and a nice second chance romance. Summer is a great character and I look forward to reading more of her adventures.
Favorite Quote:
And yet I couldn't deny that I wanted to prove that I could solve a real case. I wasn't a real PI -- I was only playing one for TV, just like I'd done before -- but I couldn't deny that I liked questioning people for real. I liked looking for clues. My gut told me I could be good at this, that for the first time in my life I could do something that helped people and made fe feel good about myself. I wanted to really give investigating a chance.I received this one in exchange for an honest review from NetGalley. You can buy your copy here.
New author, new book for me. Thanks for the review.
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