Not only do you get a PI but it’s an agency so you get a whole team! Charlie Mack is a PI with an agency she started with fellow PIs Don and Gil–who she previously worked with at INS/homeland security–and their office manager, Judy. They’re four completely different personalities who annoy each other like siblings–Judy always quoting musicals to Don’s annoyance–but at the end of the day are a great team. Which they need to be to stay alive in what starts as a simple case and gets really dangerous and complicated quick.

Mack’s father’s friend, once her mentor, needs her help: as the owner of Reliable Restaurant Supply he’s discovered that an account executive was stealing and disappeared with over a hundred grand. Mack and her team are to find her, which leads the team to travel from Detroit, Michigan to Birmingham, Alabama. Only the case has a lot of layers, people, moving parts, and secrets–oh and that danger I mentioned. So it quickly becomes clear that it’s a far-from-easy case, and they’ll need to make more than one trip to Birmingham.

And while trying to focus on the case, Mack is also trying to spend as much time as she can with her mother who is living in a care facility with the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s, and Mack has started dating a cop but is spending more time hiding from her feelings and not committing.

If you like watching cases as they unfold step by step, while trying to put the puzzle pieces together yourself, and procedural shows that involve teams of investigators, here’s your next great read. It’s everything you want in a great PI novel. And I immediately bought the second in the series upon finishing.

(TW parent early stage Alzheimer’s/ ableism/ forced vasectomy on teen)

Barclay has become my reliable popcorn thriller author–I need a tub of popcorn to inhale while inhaling his page-turners. And this one has a known hook that takes its own path and adds twists. Miles Cookson is very wealthy and has just been diagnosed with a terminal illness that is also genetic. Instead of leaving his money to his only family, his brother, he ends up discovering that the long ago donation to the sperm bank did get used and he’d rather give the resulting children his money.

Nothing personal against his brother, he just isn’t a fan of his wife. Plus, discovering he has kids makes him want to at least leave them money in case he did pass on the disease. Lucky for him, Chloe Swanson had already started looking for her biological father, so Cookson doesn’t have a hard time finding and meeting her. Except they quickly find that something isn’t right and Cookson’s half-siblings are disappearing. Did I mention the team of contract killers out just randomly killing people? Have fun trying to figure out, along with Swanon and Cookson, what is going on and how much danger they themselves are in…

This is a fun page-turner with heart that blends a mystery with thrills and action scenes. I really enjoyed the contrasting scenes between the contract killers, and Swanson and Cookson getting to know and trust each other. And bonus: I really liked the audiobook, narrated by George Newbern.

(TW suicidal thoughts recounted/ groomer of teen girls, no assault scenes on page but emotional abuse, kidnapping is/ infertility/ attempted suicide scene)