Coco Cline has gotten used to life in the spotlight. She runs a successful lifestyle blog and her social media presence is well known. After achieving so many of her personal goals, she decides to give herself a new challenge by starting a social media consulting firm in her Delaware hometown. Her life is turned upside down when she goes to meet with her clients, Sean and Olivia Chen, and instead, stumbles upon the dead body of their store assistant, Stacy. In an effort to get the police to allow the Chen’s to open their store, Coco takes the case into her own hands and tries to find out more about Stacy’s personal life. The case takes Coco and her friends on a journey that may lead to more danger than they are ready for.
It took me a while to get into this book. It was hard to get past a main character that was so focused on herself that finding any substance became difficult. I can’t count how many times she talks about her own personal celebrity status, despite claiming to be down to earth. It is understandable that she is proud of her achievements. She should be! Starting one business from the ground up is a huge accomplishment, starting a second is amazing. However, her attitude whenever anyone else was the center of attention was hard to get past. Her irritation whenever her boyfriend is recognized gets old quickly. Her focus seems very much on the material elements of the world around her.
Despite disliking the main character, I enjoyed the rest of the book. Coco’s friends Jasper and Charlotte were fun and interesting. I was pretty excited any time they joined Coco on her investigation. The three friends had really well written banter. In fact, one of the other things that I really enjoyed about the book was how well all the dialog in the book flowed. Each conversation felt relaxed and real, almost as if I could hear them happening in real life. Coupled with a well paced story line, it was a fun read once I got into it.
I have read my fair share of cozy mysteries over the years and many of them seem to forget the mystery aspect of the story. I appreciated that Coco stayed on task and became more and more interested in the mystery. It was nice to see Coco grow from only being worried about her business to caring about Stacy as a person. Watching Stacy’s life unravel was a wild ride, there were so many unexpected twists that once her life story began to come out, I was hooked.
The solution to the mystery managed to surprise me, not because I hadn’t guessed the murderer (I had pretty early on), and not in the way that the culprit was uncovered, but in the details of the motive. There had been little hints early on, but I didn’t catch them. It was cool that I could look back at different scenes with closer look.
I am curious to see where the rest of the series goes from here and how the characters will grow. Also,I need to know more about Hudson’s future plans. I absolutely loved him and would have loved the book to have even more of him
3.5/5 stars
Thank you to Netgalley and the author for the chance to read this eARC in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinions.
The Novel Llama 