Southern Fried, Southern Fried/Avery Andrews #1
Cathy Pickens
He nodded. "Since early this morning, when they served that search warrant you seemed so anxious for them to get. Seems they showed up with chips on their shoulders and suspicious minds. I've always found you gotta be very careful about suspicious minds, Avery. People have a way of seeing what they think they'll see." ~
Southern Fried, page 160
Attorney Avery Andrews left her BMW behind in Columbia, South Carolina, along with her job at a high-powered law firm. She's come back home to Dacus where the vehicle of choice is a pickup truck with a dog chained in the back. Avery wants time to rethink her career and her life. What she gets is a bossy great aunt drumming up clients and dragging her to social teas. That's how Avery ends up hired by a local factory to help with a messy environmental problem. But she's at Luna Lake because an old high-school classmate is trying to get her attention with a half-baked stunt, when divers find a car containing a corpse. Now, the discovery of the dead body sweeps Avery into a red-hot case ... and into the sizzling secrets of small-town life, where some people get away with murder.
I was looking forward to reading
Southern Fried after reading an excerpt from
Hush My Mouth, the 4th book in the series, provided by
Read It First. Unfortunately this 1st book was a disappointing start to a popular series. If you pay even the smallest bit of attention to the story line you'll easily unravel the clues to a murder and an arson fire. Also, I found Avery's character flat and one dimensional. She didn't show the personality and sense of humor that came through in the excerpt. If this had been my only exposure to this series I'd stop but I know it gets better so on to
Done Gone Wrong.