A little mystery for your weekend?
Blurb: With two brothers on the police force, Leyla Breda is well aware of the rising crime in her small beach town, but she never expected it to show up on her doorstep. When Leyla finds one of her employees murdered in the alley behind her coffee shop, she’s deeply shaken, and as a new law enforcement officer in town begins to circle her place of business, her instincts only sharpen.
Sean Moran is on an undercover mission: The seaside community of Lost Beach may look like a picturesque postcard, but his team suspects it’s a point of intersection for several crime syndicates that the FBI has been investigating for years. Even so, when the brash and beautiful Leyla Breda starts bossing him around, he’s immediately intrigued. He knows her brothers want him to back off, but every time he sees her, he feels more of a spark.
Leyla’s connections in the local community and Sean’s skills allow them to go deeper into the case together than they would be able to go alone. But when a single crime spirals into something much darker, Sean’s carefully planned mission takes a deadly turn.
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Leyla Breda, coffeeshop owner, is branching out into catering, even providing her services for her brother’s wedding. When the wedding cake isn’t delivered as arranged, Leyla heads back to the shop where the cake still remains and takes it to the wedding. The next morning discovers why the cake wasn’t delivered when she finds the body of her employee in the dark alley behind the shop. What would seem to be a robbery/murder becomes something else when FBI agent Sean Moran begins asking questions without providing any information himself in Deep Tide, the next page-turning romantic suspense in Laura Griffin’s Texas Murder Files series.
Each entry in this series just seems to get better. I have to admit that I am a fan of the suspense part, more than the romance so the fact that the steamy scenes were kept to a minimum was not a bad thing as it allowed for more focus on the mystery.
In Deep Tide, Nicole, a police detective, is almost as prominent as Leyla and Sean. I enjoyed her storyline and am interested to see what Griffin does with her in further entries–is her romance going to be with the serious journalist or another detective? This murder investigation is Nicole’s first. I liked her attitude and acknowledgement of all of the obstacles that she’s had to overcome in a male-oriented world.
The climax was gripping with a satisfying conclusion.
While it’s part of a series, it can be read as a standalone. Characters from the previous books do appear, but their jobs require them to participate so it’s not a case of too much with people you don’t care about.
I received a copy for an honest review.
