Deadly Gamble-Linda Lael Miller

I was browsing the library stacks one Saturday morning looking for something different to read. Well, I say browsing, but that implies a leisurely pace. Instead I was looking quickly since my husband was out in the car and I didn’t want to leave him too long. So after a few passes in the various paperback sections, I wandered over to the hard covers and found Deadly Gamble by Linda Lael Miller. It was a paperback but a taller one, so I guess the librarians thought it would fit better with the hard covers. The premise seemed interesting enough, so what the heck, why not give it a shot? It wasn’t until I was in the parking lot until I took a closer look at it and saw that the publisher is HQN, with their tagline “We Are Romance”. Uh-oh. While I do enjoy a wide variety of books, romance novels are on the bottom of that pile. And Ms. Miller is the author of a western romance series as well. I was looking for something different, I guess I had it!

Mojo Sheepshanks is the heroine of this book. She’s a free spirit in her late twenties who possibly witnessed the death of her parents when she was five. She was also kidnapped by the woman who was her babysitter and formed a tight family bond with her. She starts having problems when the ghost of her late ex-husband and the ghost of the cat killed by her stepbrother when she was four appear in her apartment. While she’s dealing with the ghosts, she is also dealing with a crazy ex-wife of someone she dated once, a hunky cop whose ex-wife who wants him back but now while he’s a cop, a sister who wants her to find out if her husband is sleeping around, an uncle who is a state senator and is now running for governor, and her stepbrother who was convicted of her parents’ murder but is now free and apparently stalking her.

So with all of that going on, it was hard at first to figure out the main focus of the story. After a while, though, I realized the best course of action would be to sit back and let the story unfold. Some plot points are really only in the story to set up other events in the story. This was more of a detective story than a romance novel, along the lines of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series, although not quite as over-the-top.

Overall, I’m glad I found this book, and didn’t let the romance tag scare me away. It’s a good “shut your brain off and enjoy” book, and with summer coming up this would be a perfect thing to read while lying on the beach.