Trouble Follows You

By Bonnie Edwards

Barbara Black is the protagonist of Trouble Follows You and she tells her story from a first person point of view. Thirty-five and recently divorced from a philandering husband, she strikes out to become a Private Investigator with financial survival as her goal. She works part time following up potential insurance cheats for a larger investigations company. She drums up her own first PI case when the wife of an author Barbara had heard speak at an event is shot and the husband is accused of the murder. The husband is a creep, but claims his innocency, and Barbara takes the case.

While involved in searching out background information for her first case, she gets a second case. Her ex-husband wants her to do a deep background check on his current wife. With the promise of good monetary compensation served up with a side of potential revenge, Barbara takes the case and soon finds herself following some shady characters from Tucson to Oklahoma.

I enjoyed this cozy mystery. The plot is good with threads and motivations that keep the reader guessing. While the investigation of murder is serious, the author manages to inject humor throughout. From time to time, in cozy mysteries, the actions of the protagonist do occasionally step over the legal line and sometimes are not quite believable. Trouble Follows You drifts into these territories increasing the reader’s enjoyment. The book is, after all, fiction and a great escape from more serious tomes. The author lives in Tucson, Arizona, which is the major setting for her books. 

Rating: 4/5

Category: Mystery

Notes: 1. #1 in the Adventures of Babs Black series which currently has 3 books in the series. 

    2. Clean cozy mystery with exactly 5 offensive words in the whole book. 

    3. There is another author by the same name who writes erotic romances.

Publication: December 6, 2019—Deadly Press

Memorable Lines:

I know teachers. If the plan was a cooperative one among them, they’d still be arguing about who got to pull the trigger.

“Confident, a little brassy, quite sure that she was right about everything. What I mean to say is over-confident and obnoxiously brazen, but my original statement seemed so much more proper.”

There is not much in this world that chocolate won’t solve. The combination of ice cream and chocolate is the universal cure for  whatever ails you.