Blood Moon

October 1, 2024

Detective John Bowie is stymied in the case of a missing girl. Beth Collins, a senior producer on the true-crime show Crisis Point, might have a lead that lands her on the trail of the killer and requires her to team up with John to stop another murder. Award-winning Brown, who has written 76 bestsellers, gets a 250K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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January 1, 2025
Sandra Brown's readers know what she's up to. Her seventy-plus novels, mostly romance and suspense, often contain sly parodies of pop genres. Her current offering begins with a familiar scene: a lawman enters a saloon, orders a drink, and pays no mind to the jeers of the boozed-up yahoos nearby. Brown invites the reader to grin knowingly, only for the scene to turn wonky. The story unfolds from there: a female producer of a true-crime TV show visits Auclair, Louisiana, for a story on unsolved cases of disappearing teenage girls. She finds herself sharing notes with a local cop scarred by betrayal--his boss once wanted a case wrapped quickly: he obeyed, even though he knew it betrayed the victims. Why? He wanted in on the promotion track and its promised a pay increase. Such shots of realism keep the novel anchored in the everyday, as do bursts of nice writing and a couple of steamy sex scenes. The story reminds us what a fine writer Brown is.

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March 15, 2025
A TV producer and a detective try to stop a strange pattern of young women disappearing. In "Auclair, Loooziana," disillusioned detective John Bowie reluctantly meets in a bar with Beth Collins, producer for the true crime showCrisis Point. She needs to interview him about the disastrous case of the missing Crissy Mellin, but he refuses. The teenager disappeared three years ago on the night of a blood moon and hasn't been found, but a suspect hanged himself in jail after signing a confession. Case closed, says John's boss. But John is convinced that their prisoner could not have been guilty, and he's deeply upset at his failure. "The Mellin case messed up your life," Beth tells him. She persuades John that Crissy's disappearance is the latest of a series that happen on the night of a blood moon, the colloquial term for a total lunar eclipse. "It's going to happen again," she predicts. And wouldn't you know, another blood moon is coming in four days.Tick, tick, tick. Beth's boss atCrisis Point insists on airing an update on the case, but Beth knows the show is going to get it wrong, and its reputation will be ruined. Meanwhile, there's an electric sexual tension between Beth and John that the author toys with nicely--do they, or don't they? The answer plays out in detail more than once. The characters are fun if easy to pigeonhole: the detective angry at his failure, the honest (and beautiful) outsider eager to do her job but susceptible to love, the hero's corrupt (to say the least) boss, and the ogre who carries out said boss's dirtiest deeds. Even John's dog, Mutt, plays a small but vital role. When John found him, he'd been "a flea-bitten hide wrapped around a skeleton that whimpered." Little plot devices are easy to spot, like the phone that rings at a crucial moment, or the handgun that John places in Beth's hand for her protection. Does Chekhov's guideline apply here? The romantic angle leavens the dark theme, and readers will have plenty of incentives to turn the pages. A satisfying crime novel with a side order of romance.

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