[Review] Sunset Beach - Mary Kay Andrews

Summary: Drue Campbell’s life is adrift. Out of a job and down on her luck, life doesn’t seem to be getting any better when her estranged father, Brice Campbell, a flamboyant personal injury attorney, shows up at her mother’s funeral after a twenty-year absence. Worse, he’s remarried – to Drue’s eighth grade frenemy, Wendy, now his office manager. And they’re offering her a job.

It seems like the job from hell, but the offer is sweetened by the news of her inheritance – her grandparents’ beach bungalow in the sleepy town of Sunset Beach, a charming but storm-damaged eyesore now surrounded by waterfront McMansions.

With no other prospects, Drue begrudgingly joins the firm, spending her days screening out the grifters whose phone calls flood the law office. Working with Wendy is no picnic either. But when a suspicious death at an exclusive beach resort nearby exposes possible corruption at her father’s firm, she goes from unwilling cubicle rat to unwitting investigator, and is drawn into a case that may – or may not – involve her father. With an office romance building, a decades-old missing persons case re-opened, and a cottage in rehab, one thing is for sure at Sunset Beach: there’s a storm on the horizon. (Pub Date: May 07, 2019)

This is more of a 3+, really. A very charismatic crime mystery that got me actually curious to the very end.

Drue needs to move back to Sunset Beach after her mother's death and unemployment. Now she has to work for her stranded father and ex-best-friend-gone-frenemy-now-stepmother. It's far from her dream job until she sees herself in the middle of an investigation on the side to find out the truth behind the cold-case murder of a black single mother.

I'm always surprised at how much Mary Kay Andrews can change from a book to the other. My image of her is still of a romance book I picked up many years ago but her last three go further and further away from the genre. Yes, there's still romance, but it's surely not the point, I'd call it a mere bonus actually.

Of course, the detective part isn't superb though. Since Drue is an amateur investigator I frowned a bit as she'd find out things the professionals didn't, but it wasn't that much. As I mentioned before, the solution wasn't even that predictable. I'm not saying it's got a lot of plot twists or that i never would have thought about it, but I didn't guess it from the first page so the book kept me interested to the end. Of course it's not super unpredictable either. The author still has to refine the art of deceit. But this was enjoyable enough.

I also liked Drue a lot. I wish we could have seen more of her romantic interest in action too. Actually, this book seemed full of interesting characters I notice now that we never get to meet. That's a pity. But Drue was a great main character, she's faced a lot of challenges and need to pick herself back up from the ground now her mother is gone. I also liked a lot her exchanges with her father, he was such a good character I really feared he'd die in the second chapter or so—I confess I tend to forget summaries once I decide to read a book. So I'm glad we got to enjoy him along the book.

This is still a book that just goes a little bit above average. I definitely recommend it to those who like both romances and thrillers, since it's not either here or there.


Honest review based on an ARC provided by Netgalley. Many thanks to the publisher for this opportunity.


Rating: 3 out of 5.