Sting of Lies
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Can solving a mysterious poisoning save her career? Oh, and lead her to a long-lost buried treasure? Wait. AND thrust her into the arms of true love?
Ice Age paleontologist and poisons expert Myrna P. Lee isn't a team player. Not because she doesn't want to be. She's just terrible at it. At least, that's what every one in her lab says. Even her dog, the amazing William Tell, gives her attitude.
Maybe she has a hard time trusting because of past betrayals by people she's loved the most.
So, it's just fine with her when she's dispatched to a remote billionaire's ranch in Northern New Mexico tasked with solving a mysterious environmental poisoning. Besides, there's a secret mammoth kill site on the ranch she desperately hopes will supply enough data so that her megafauna poisons grant won't be rescinded for lack of progress. Myrna is determined to complete her commission, gather her mammoth info, and save her faltering career-all by herself.
Maybe she's used to being alone and doesn't need anything from anyone, no siree.
Until a handsome cowboy, assigned as her minder, moseys up to her side and sets her heart pounding, and a motley bunch of ranch hands embrace her as part of their found family.
Maybe that "alone" part of her life is in the past.
When she and William Tell stumble onto a decades old unsolved murder, the handsome cowboy tells her it's linked to a long-lost treasure and the mammoth kill site. And it's hard to stay focused on solving the poisonings when everything she discovers places her in the sights of villains who don't care who they hurt in pursuit of the treasure.
Then betrayal hits Myrna from all sides, and her world shatters into teeny, tiny pieces. She has a choice: retreat back to being alone or fight for her happiness.
But questions remain.
• Will Myrna solve the mysterious poisoning?
• Will she figure out who committed the long-ago murder?
• Will she find the treasure before the bad guys do?
• Will she pick up the pieces of her broken heart and forgive?
And just how will she use those hand grenades she found on her quest for the treasure?
If you like stubborn smart heroines afraid to love, rugged cowboys with slow and sexy smiles who get caught in their own web of seduction, and a small dog who surprises the heck out of people when he's picked up, then you'll love Sting of Lies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Potenza (the Nicky Matthews series) pairs an idiosyncratic sleuth with a rip-roaring plot in this promising series launch. Gruff paleontologist and poison expert Myrna Lee, whose colorful past includes stealing from Siberian ivory hunters who subsequently threatened her with a rocket launcher, is seeking evidence to support her theory that human ancestors hunted prehistoric megafauna, including mammoths, with poison. With few promising leads and her grant funds drying up, Lee is thrilled to learn that a New Mexico ranch owned by the influential Donavan family houses a collection of artifacts that could help prove her thesis. Lee attempts to persuade matriarch Sylvia Donavan to give her access to the collection if she solves the mystery of what, or who, is poisoning elks on the ranch—deaths which, if they're made public, could scuttle the presidential aspirations of Sylvia's husband, Charles. Lee's mission grows even more complicated when she finds evidence that the poisonings were intentional, then discovers the body of an apparent murder victim on the property. Potenza peppers the action with plenty of enjoyable plot twists, and Lee's endearingly antisocial antics make her a refreshingly iconoclastic lead. Readers will be eager for the sequel. (Self-published)
