I’ve always been a reader but the intensity has varied over the years. The pandemic brought that hobby back with force, not just because all of a sudden we had a lot more time on our hands and needed more ways to entertain ourselves at home. But also because getting caught up in a good book is a mental escape that I found was even better when used to cope with what can feel like some pretty mundane days. A bit like Groundhog Day if you will, wake up and every day looks and feels exactly the same.
Looking at the list of books I’ve read so far in 2021, mysteries have been about half of them. And I’d argue that if the mental escape of a good book for a few hours is sounding like just the thing you need too, I have a new to me author to share that I’ve enjoyed. Like enjoyed to the level of reading all the books she’s written in a matter of just a few weeks.
Kristen Lepionka is a writer based in Columbus, Ohio and that’s where her four book series about Roxane Weary, a private investigator with complicated family dynamics and personal relationships takes place too. Having lived in Columbus for almost 19 years now, some of the added fun for me was the stories involving places I’m familiar with and could picture – where I work is actually mentioned really briefly in one of the books! But all that aside, this series has a really likable main character probably because of rather than in spite of her personal struggles.
I’ll reference the books in order which I’d say is recommended but not necessary. I read the most recent book first when I picked it up off a display at the front of the library then started back at the beginning for the rest. There was only one character in the story that made a lot more sense once I went back and read the first book but nothing that prevented me from understanding the storyline!
Follow along as she tried to find out if a man convicted of killing his high school girlfriend’s parents is innocent and doesn’t deserve to be reaching the end of death row in The Last Place You Look (my favorite in the series). The girlfriend has been missing since the night of her parent’s murder fifteen years ago and Roxanne tries to find her to get answers about what really happened that night. What she finds instead is more missing and more dead teenage girls and more of a fight than she bargained for to find the truth.
She’s hired to follow around a super shady fiancee who ends up murdered and Roxane’s client is the prime suspect in What You Want to See. You’ll follow along as she uncovers the murdered woman’s true identity and the manipulative past that comes along with it.
In The Stories You Tell, Roxane’s brother is the last person to see a young aspiring DJ who is in a panic when she leaves his place and she investigates, worried about her brother who has been in trouble with the courts before being the primary focus of the investigation. As other events unfold, she discovers that the club the DJ worked at might have more going on behind closed doors than it seems.
Once You Go This Far is about Roxane investigating the accidental hiking death of a junior high school nurse because her daughter doesn’t believe it was an accident. Her investigation leads her across state and country lines and into the world of a very secretive and dangerous church group as she tries to determine how it all may connect to her clients’ mother.
Life in the Ordinary 