foul play and flowers

It’s time for the Cedar River Bluebonnet Festival, and Juni Jessop and her sisters are providing the music, courtesy of their Sip & Spin record shop. There is a stage for local bands to play, but in between, they’ve got the music spinning to keep everyone happy. While Juni had only moved back to Texas recently, she remembered the festival from when she went as a kid with her sisters. Now it’s even bigger, with more rides and food trucks, but still with the 4-H animal tent and the pole-digging competition.

While the pole-digging competition was a throwback to a bank robbery that had happened in the town over sixty years before, it was a much more recent crime that occupied Juni that first morning of the festival. The mayor, Bob Bobbert, had stopped by the Sip & Spin booth for some coffee, and he wasn’t too impressed with the one selection they had chosen to feature there. As Juni had to get something from the shop, she decided to make the mayor one of his favorite drinks and take it to him at his office. But instead of finding a grateful coffee fan, she finds the mayor dead, still holding in his hands the coffee cup with the Sip & Spin logo that he had gotten from their booth, made by Juni’s sister Tansy.

Juni calls the police right away, and her ex-boyfriend Beau show up to start the investigation. He won’t give her many details from what he and the crime scene team find out, but she knows that as soon as it gets out to their small town that the mayor had been killed and had been clutching one of their coffee cups when it happened, that the foot traffic for their coffees would grind to a halt. And she and her sisters counted on those coffee drinkers to stay and buy some records. She had put all of her money into the business, and she just couldn’t sit back and watch it go under because of this.

As Juni and her sisters go around town, trying to learn more about the mayor and who might have wanted him out of the way, they find some interesting suspects. Marcus Best is a used car salesman and their mother’s new boyfriend, but he had recently invested in some real estate in a secret deal with the mayor. Could that have had something to do with the man’s death? Or Leanna, the head of the town’s council and Tansy’s long-time rival, swoops in to become acting mayor mere hours after the man died. Could she have killed him to further her own political career? Or was it someone online who had been bidding against the mayor in his drive to accumulate as much memorabilia as possible for that old bank robbery? Even Juni’s uncle Calvin was interested in buying some of that.

All Juni knows for certain is that she and her sisters had nothing to do with the murder. And she wants to get to the bottom of the mystery before they lose their family business to rumors, lies, and small town gossip.

A Fatal Groove is the second book in Olivia Blacke’s Record Shop mysteries, set in the heat of a Texas summer, but filled with country warmth and the camaraderie of a small town. Juni and her sisters and their beloved record store fill these pages with family love, companionship, and lots of good food and music while they try to find the truth.

I loved A Fatal Groove. The backdrop of the Bluebonnet Festival added brightness to this murder mystery, and the relationship of Juni and her family adds a lot of love and a little snark to the story as well. The coffee names are extremely punny, and who doesn’t love a surprise cow? And while I figured out who the killer was pretty early, I still enjoyed reading this book as it was just a pleasure to read. The words glided across the page, making me feel like I was having a great time at the festival, except maybe for the stomachache from eating too much. A Fatal Groove is a lovey addition to this series, and I genuinely can’t wait to see what Juni and her sisters will be up to next.

Egalleys for A Fatal Groove were provided by St. Martin’s Press through NetGalley, with many thanks.