Readers who enjoy murder mysteries with lots of intertwined plotlines, quirky characters and zany hijinks topped off with a healthy dose of horniness will be delighted by bestselling author Darynda Jones’ A Good Day for Chardonnay.
The small tourist town of Del Sol, New Mexico, is populated by unruly residents who are staunchly community-minded and happen to be, per Sheriff Sunshine Vicram’s hilariously lusty inner monologues, quite desirable. To wit, her chief deputy and BFF Quincy is “sexy feet, AF inches” tall. And her lifelong crush, local-badboy-turned-wealthy-distillery-owner Levi Ravinder? Well, he and his crime-aficionado family look “as though [they were] chiseled by the gods . . . [with] lean, solid bodies and razor-sharp jawlines.”
But while Sunshine is often mightily distracted by eye candy, she’s also dedicated to—and excellent at—her job. She’s been back in town for four months after being away for 15 years, and she has multiple mysteries to solve. The newest include a bar fight gone terribly wrong; resurfaced cold cases with ties to her own traumatic past; and a raft of false confessions. On top of that, the mayor is pressuring her to figure out if the Dangerous Daughters secret society (rumored to have run the town for decades) is real or just local legend.
And then there’s Sunshine’s daughter Auri, whom fans met in series kickoff A Bad Day for Sunshine. The smart, reckless teenager is determined to solve crimes just like her mom, and she pursues a sweet old lady who might be a serial killer. Auri is also Sunshine’s personal mystery: at 17, the sheriff was abducted by Levi’s uncle and held captive for five days, after which she emerged pregnant and with severe memory loss.
Will Levi’s family finally answer Sunshine’s questions about her abduction? Can she catch the marauding raccoon that’s terrorizing the town? How are the cold cases tied to these complex new crimes? With her trademark warmth and humor, Jones answers some of these questions and raises even more, nicely teeing up the next installment in Sunshine’s complicated, sexy and highly entertaining life story.
