Tuesday, May 14, 2013

A Matter of Trust ~ Lis Wiehl with April Henry review

A Matter of Trust (A Mia Quinn Mystery)
Thomas Nelson Publishers
March 19, 2013
320 pages
add to Goodreads/buy from Book Depo/or Amazon


When life is murder, who can you trust?

One minute Mia Quinn is in her basement, chatting on the phone with a colleague at the prosecutor's office. The next minute there's a gunshot over the line, and Mia listens in horror as her colleague and friend Colleen bleeds to death.

Mia's a natural for heading up the murder investigation, but these days she has all she can do to hold her life together. As a new widow with a pile of debts, a troubled teenaged son, and a four-year-old who wakes up screaming at night, she needs more time with her family, not less--and working Colleen's case will be especially demanding. But Colleen was her friend, and she needs to keep her job. So she reluctantly teams up with detective Charlie Carlson to investigate Colleen's death. But the deeper they dig, the more complications unfold--even the unsettling possibility that someone may be coming after her.

Lis Wiehl's signature plot twists and relatable characters shine in this absorbing series debut . . . with an intriguing cameo from her best-selling Triple Threat series.


I haven't read any of Lis Wiehl's novels before (but have read April Henry's Girl Stolen) but A Matter of Trust looked interesting and it was available on audio when I was looking for something new.

The start of a new series (with, I guess, some crossover from Wiehl and Henry's Triple Threat series) A Matter of Trust focuses on Mia Quinn, recently returned to work at the King County District Attorney's Office. So many things have changed in the years Mia was away from the office, caring for her children. Without her friend -- and fellow prosecutor -- Colleen's words of assurance, Mia would be lost.

Only, then Colleen is murdered, while Mia is on the phone with her.

As Mia struggles to mange both her new case and her new life, she finds out more than she was expecting about both her late husband and all that he was keeping from her about himself and their life and about Colleen.

A Matter of Trust was enjoyable with the mix of Mia's work and personal life. The way they overlapped and how she had to balance them, as they each became more demanding of her and her time added tension and intrigue to the story and also made her character more interesting.

The different story lines involving teenagers in the novel were very relevant and timely and also integrated into the main story very well. They didn't seem stuck in just because they were 'current.' They also had great parallels with the other characters lives and stories.

The 'mystery' aspect of the book was a bit less, mysterious than I would have preferred with the whodunit being revealed, or strongly hinted at, sooner than I would have liked. As I said, I haven't read any of Wiehl's novels before so I don't know if this is her style or something unique to A Matter of Trust.

That this is the start of a series allows me to forgive this more, however, than I would have if it had been a standalone. I'm really intrigued by the characters we're introduced to here and anxious to see which ones will be back in the next book as well as what the plot of that novel will be.


Rating: 8/10


1 comment:

  1. The different story lines involving teenagers in the novel were very relevant and timely and also integrated into the main story very well.

    ReplyDelete

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