July 10, 2023
Three women bond while investigating a homicide in Simon’s spirited debut. Lana Rubicon and her 17-year-old daughter, Beth, become estranged when Beth gets pregnant and relocates five hours north of Los Angeles to raise her baby alone. Fifteen years later, Lana is a high-powered L.A. real estate developer, and Beth is a nurse who shares a humble cottage in Elkhorn Slough with her now-teenage daughter, Jack. Though Lana has always refused to visit Beth and Jack’s “shack about to fall into a mud pit,” she moves in while undergoing treatment for cancer. Four months of cohabitation do nothing to curb her feelings of uselessness and alienation from her daughter and granddaughter, however. Then, a kayak tour led by Jack comes across naturalist Ricardo Cruz’s floating corpse. Racist local police target Jack—who’s half Filipino on her father’s side—based on the flimsy testimony of one of her clients, and Lana resolves to exonerate her granddaughter and reconnect with Beth in the process. Simon stocks her layered plot with plausibly motivated suspects and convincing red herrings, but it’s her indomitable female characters and their nuanced relationships that give this mystery its spark. Readers will be delighted. Agent: Stefanie Lieberman, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

July 1, 2023
Sleuthing is a family affair in this novel featuring strong women and even stronger motives for murder. When teenage Jack Rubicon becomes the prime suspect following the discovery of a body in Monterey Bay's Elkhorn Slough, her mother, Beth, and grandmother Lana step in to prove she's innocent. Mother-daughter bonding rituals don't usually include criminal investigations, but in this by-the-book, well-paced debut crime novel, three independent women morph into amateur sleuths to solve the murder of Ricardo Cruz, a young man who worked for a local land trust. At the time of Ricardo's death, Lana is living with Beth and Jack while she undergoes cancer treatment. An energetic Los Angeles real estate mogul who doesn't " 'do' sick," the antsy Lana sets up a murder board and decides to pass the time gathering evidence about Ricardo's death. Beth and Lana have been on the outs ever since Beth became a single mother 15 years before. They'd once had a good relationship, and one of Beth's fondest childhood memories involves the nights she and Lana obsessed over episodes of Columbo, trying to ferret out the identity of the murderers. Having learned that rumpled detective's crime-solving techniques will soon prove invaluable when Beth and Jack are pulled into the investigation as well. They soon discover another suspicious death tied to a wealthy local family fighting over the fate of a multimillion-dollar ranch on the Monterey coast. Simon puts most of her muscle into developing Lana's character while Beth and Jack, as likable as they are, aren't as fully drawn. Simon knows how to build an intriguing plot with lots of suspects, plenty of red herrings, and a handful of jaw-clenching attacks on the Rubicons designed to stop their investigation. Nancy Drew meets Columbo in this feisty-female-driven whodunit.

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August 1, 2023
Glue-gun-wielding nurse Beth Rubicon and her mother, Lana, a renowned L.A. real-estate shark, both see prickly moments ahead when Lana's cancer diagnosis forces her to move in with Beth in Elkhorn Slough, a sleepy coastal town in Northern California. But neither anticipates Lana and her 15-year-old granddaughter, Jack, hunting a murderer. After Jack finds a dead body while leading a kayak tour of the slough near their home, local detectives peg her as a suspect. Determined not to let her granddaughter get railroaded, Lana leaps into action, following a hunch that Paul, Jack's employer at the Kayak Shack, is involved. Then, Hal Rhoads, Beth's favorite patient at the Bayshore Oaks long-term-care facility, dies unexpectedly. Hal was one of Elkhorn Slough's largest landowners, and his death triggers competing property claims from his children and the local land trust. Hal's daughter, Diana, draws on Lana's real-estate expertise, unknowingly placing them all in a murderer's sight. On the cozy side, this debut mystery is woven around family rifts and redemption, and will leave readers with warm fuzzies.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from September 1, 2023

DEBUT One of the things Beth regrets most in life is that she doesn't have a closer relationship with her mother, Lana Rubicon. That all changes, however, when Lana is forced to take a hiatus from her high-powered Los Angeles real-estate career to deal with cancer and subsequently moves in with Beth and her granddaughter Jack. When Jack stumbles across a dead body while leading a kayaking tour of the nearby slough and becomes the local police's main suspect, Lana finds another way of engaging with her daughter and granddaughter by doing a bit of snooping. Can it really be true that the family that sleuths together, stays together? Simon's dazzling debut delivers everything a mystery fan could crave, including a realistically nuanced cast of characters, a vividly evoked coastal California setting, writing imbued with a deliciously desiccated sense of wit, and a perfectly plotted murder with enough red herrings deftly dropped in to confound the most experienced mystery reader. VERDICT Insightful and frequently funny analysis of family dynamics wrapped up in a cleverly crafted cozy crime novel.--John Charles

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