Features The Big Thrill Recommends: MURDEROUS MEANS by Lida Sideris

The Big Thrill Recommends: MURDEROUS MEANS by Lida Sideris

Recommendation by Tracey Phillips

When inexperienced private investigator Corrie Locke goes looking for a killer, she digs up a mismatched bunch of clues and a family of real characters in this southwest murder mystery. Matriarch and landowner, JoJo Means, died in her sleep. Or so the medical examiner says. Psychic Heidi Honeyman believes there’s more to it. Corrie Locke is a hardcore skeptic of paranormal telepaths, but she needs this job.

Following her father’s footsteps, Corrie has applied for her P.I. license and needs the experience. She creeps around the deceased woman’s immaculate ranch house looking for clues and comes up with a conservationist’s pin, an out-of-place yellow washcloth, and a large bump on her noggin.

Everyone knows psychics use their detective skills to woo-woo their customers, and two can play that game. Corrie enlists her goofy and handsome boyfriend, Michael Parris, to fake it too. With two psychics on the job, friends and family come out of the woodwork. Corrie’s legal assistant, Veera Bankhead, helps investigate every member of the Means family, a crafty and cunning bunch slated to inherit Means Well Ranch. The psychic, a gambler, a general store owner, a half-sister with a criminal record, and a gun-toting neighbor all become suspects along with the rest of the family.

Another man is murdered. A clue, a missing case of toothpaste, leads Corrie and her team to the center of the estate and a rare frog habitat. Corrie does what any investigator would do: she gets all the players together and has a sleepover. MURDEROUS MEANS is a highly entertaining second-in-series and fun follow-up to Gambling with Murder. Fans of the movie Knives Out will love Lida Sideris’s Southern California Mystery series.

MURDEROUS MEANS by Lida Sideris