Sunday, February 5, 2023

Once You Go This Far

Once You Go This Far (Roxane Weary, #4)Once You Go This Far by Kristen Lepionka
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When Roxane has a chance encounter with a hiker who winds up dead shortly after, she gets hired by the deceased woman's daughter to look into her mother's death and uncovers a lot more than that...

As I said in my last review, I'm chewing through the backlog of books I've accumulated in the last few years now that I have some extra time on my hands. I wish I would have tackled this one immediately because it was pretty damn good.

In this volume in the ongoing saga of Roxane Weary, she gets entangled with a runaway kid, an evangelical group, and finds out she has a half sister. Some other stuff happens too.

The Roxane Weary books are good mysteries but the main attraction for me now are the characters. Roxane and her two bothers, Tom, Shelby, and probably Blair in the next book even though she hasn't stepped on stage yet. Roxane is a tough lady with problems but that's what makes her so interesting. More importantly, her relationships are in a constant state of flux, something that doesn't always happen in a mystery series. There's no perfect love for Susan Silverman here.

Well, two Roxane Weary books in two days. I'll find some way to amuse myself until the next one comes out, hopefully soonish.

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The Stories You Tell

The Stories You Tell (Roxane Weary, #3)The Stories You Tell by Kristen Lepionka
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When her brother calls her in the middle of the night, Roxane Weary is thrust into a web of mysteries involving a missing girl, a hookup phone app, and lots of people lying about various things.

So a few years ago, my reading time partially dried up and I mostly started reading comics and other things I didn't pay a lot of attention to. Now that my son is older and I don't lose two hours of my life to the commute, I can read actual books again.

Enough about me, though. This is the third Roxane Weary book and it's some good shit. Kristen Lepionka writes a good gritty mystery. I wouldn't exactly call it noir but it's darker than the average mystery. Lepionka has definitely read her Chandler, though.

The mystery isn't really a solvable one, although there are some pretty big hints out there. A one time hookup shows up at Roxane's brother's place and he's quickly in the soup. Roxane pokes around, uncovers a lot of unsavory things, and eventually things are set as right as they're going to get.

Roxane is a great lead character, flawed as hell but still determined. Her relationships with the other characters make this a cut above a lot of books of this type. From her toxic relationship with her girlfriend Catherine to whatever her feelings for Tom, her father's former partner are, to her somewhat motherly role with her teenage neighbors.

I don't know what else to say without giving away too much. There's a lot of catfishing in this so be careful who you're talking to online would be the core lesson of this, if there is one.

Four out of five stars. I'm going to blaze through the second one today pending unforeseen interruptions.

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