Sara M. Barton

Miz Scarlet Wilson is an innkeeper. After financial losses including getting caught in a Ponzi scheme, she has turned the family mansion into a destination inn for those who are handicapped or in need of medical care. But when a very suspicious guest is found dead, Scarlet finds out that she is in the middle of long-range and deadly plot.

There is a lot of family background to begin this story which introduces ancestors and tells the family history. Currently, Scarlet is living with her mother, her mother's cousin, and her twice-divorced brother Bur. There are also a variety of guests at the inn.

Bur's friend and Scarlet's teenage crush is now a security professional who has been called in to look into the disappearance of a family from another of Scarlet's family's home. He is also interested in investigating where the family money has gone.

The plot was a little bit all over the place. Things happened very quickly and involved a couple of Scarlet's old boyfriends who had a definite agenda for dating her. I thought the story tried to do too much. Plot twists kept appearing and making things more complicated. Then the story ended without really resolving a lot of the issues.

While I enjoyed Scarlet's snarkiness, I didn't enjoy her relationship with her brother which seemed too juvenile for people in their late 40s and early 50s. Bur comes across as a juvenile prankster instead of a the well-respected professional that he should have been. I did like the budding romance between Scarlet and Bur's friend but thought it got too little page time.… (más)