Augusta Hawke
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Sometimes it's safer not to know your neighbors' secrets.
Where are Niko and Zora Norman? Crime writer Augusta Hawke puts her sleuthing skills to the test to solve the mystery of her disappearing neighbors in the first entry in a new series.
While Augusta Hawke is a successful author of eighteen crime novels, since her husband's death she's been living vicariously through her Jules Maigret-like detective Claude and his assistant Caroline. Then a handsome police detective appears investigating a real-life mystery.
Where are her neighbors, the Normans? No one has a clue what's happened - except Augusta. Although she isn't nosy, spending all day staring out the windows for inspiration means she does notice things. Like the Normans arguing. And that they've been missing a week.
Once the Normans' car is found abandoned, Augusta senses material for a bestseller and calls on the investigatory skills she's developed as a crime writer. But she soon uncovers long-hidden secrets and finds herself facing real-life dangers her characters never faced . . . ones she can't write her way out of.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This middling series launch from Agatha winner Malliet (the Max Tudor novels) introduces Augusta Hawke, a widowed bestselling mystery author who lives in a "quaint village" in northern Virginia. Her boring routines are shaken up by the disappearance of her neighbors, Niko and Zora Norman. Augusta, a born busybody, thought she heard a woman's cry from the Norman home before they went missing and can't resist poking into the police inquiry—or being attracted to the hunky police detective in charge. Her investigation takes her out-of-state and into predictable peril. At the start, revelations about the mental issues of Augusta's parents suggest she will be a psychologically complex lead, but she turns out to be a Jessica Fletcher–wannabe without that character's empathy or intelligence. Malliet doesn't sweat the details, as shown by her having Augusta state simultaneously that her debut book went virtually unnoticed—and was reviewed by the New York Times. This talented author is capable of better.
