contract killer

When Tricia Miles and her sister Angelica went to check on Angelica’s latest business venture, renovating the Morrison Mansion into office space. Angelica was going to use the space for Nigela Ricita Associates, the development company she ran under an alias. But when the sisters went to the mansion so Angelica could show off the work to Tricia early one morning, what they found was the head contractor, Sanjay Arya. But he wasn’t working. He’d been killed.

Tricia and Angelica have a lot going on, between running their respective businesses and co-presidents of the local Chamber of Commerce. For the summer, they’ve hired an intern named David Price to help with the day-to-day office work of answering phones and such for the Chamber. Tricia also runs one of the many local bookshops, a mystery store called Haven’t Got a Clue. Angelica owns several businesses around town, including a beauty shop, an inn, and the café where the sisters usually meet for lunch.

Jim Stark ran the contracting company where Sanjay had worked, and Stark had done work for both of the sisters. Sanjay had been his right-hand man, handling a thousand details for the Morrison Mansion job as well as many others. Now, all those jobs are on hold, and the mansion is a crime scene. While Tricia had been known for doing some amateur investigating from time to time, Angelica told her in no uncertain terms that she should leave this one alone. And Tricia intended to do just that.

Except.

Their intern David has different ideas. He’d done some research on the town before he got there. He knew about the murders that had happened in the area, and he knew Tricia was involved with many of them. He wanted to investigate, and he wasn’t going to be deterred. When Tricia accompanied him on one fact-finding mission, she realized that his heavy-handed investigating skills wasn’t going to get him very far. She agrees to help, partly to protect him from himself and partly because despite their age difference, Tricia finds herself drawn to him.

But the closer they get to the truth about Sanjay, wading through the gossip and the facts, the closer Tricia gets to coming face-to-face with another killer. Will she figure out how to protect herself, and her heart, before it’s too late?

A Questionable Character is book 17 in Lorna Barrett’s Booktown Mystery series. The series is set around a small town filled with bookstores and book-themed restaurants and around the Miles sisters, who give so much back to the town. But while the town has charm and history, it also has dark secrets, and Tricia has had to face a lot of them.

This was my first time in Booktown, but I really enjoyed it. I liked the Miles sisters and how much they cared for the town. I did think Tricia made some short-sighted mistakes in her investigation, and that was a little disappointing in a series that has gone on for so long, but overall, I thought it was an interesting plot, well developed, with lots of memorable characters. I feel lucky to have been introduced to Booktown through A Questionable Character, and I will need to make trips to visit Booktown in the future.

Egalleys for A Questionable Character were provided by Berkley through NetGalley, with many thanks.