No Body No Crime by Tess Sharpe (2025)
This is girl power with a vengeance. And a whole lot of good fun to read as two young women, burning for each other since adolescence, take on no less than a malignant family dynasty of men, all of them named variations of Richard. Do I even need to repeat the suitable nickname for this patriarchal collection of creeps? The book does......frequently.
Twenty something P.I. Mel goes on the hunt for the lost love of her life Chloe, who dropped out of sight not long after Chloe's eventful Sweet 16 Party. 'Eventful' is putting it mildly - the girls teamed up to bury the body of scummy, nasty drug dealer and all around odious human Toby.
But wiping Toby off the face of the earth put Chloe in the path of the all-powerful Newell family, a murderous clan of political power brokers, for whom Toby functioned as a minion. And Toby, before Mel and Chloe put him six feet under, stole something from the Newell men.....something they've sent out thugs to pry out of Chloe......or whoever might've helped her.
Action, suspense, and twists follow as Mel finds Chloe living off the grid in the Canadian backwoods. The two women can barely take a breath to rekindle their long delayed passion for each other, what with the Newell Nabobs and their goons hot on their heels at every moment.
As much as I enjoyed this book, I'm not sure what readers will make of the girls' climactic showdown with the hateful Newells. Clever, kind of funny and immensely satisfying? Sure. But convoluted, complicated, borderline silly and hard to swallow? There's a case to be made for that too.
But let's not quibble. I simply got a great summer reading experience out of this one. You can't help but cheer for Mel and Chloe, re-heating their heat while they confound, upend and outwit a basket of writhing snakes who woefully underestimated them.
4 stars (****).
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