Looking For a Good Book

Emmeline “Emme” Helliwell is a special agent with the National Park Service. She has returned to her Utah hometown to grieve and recover after the death of her mother and regain her composure and confidence after a failure from a recent mission.

When a body turns up in the Narrows of Zion National Park, Emme is called in to investigate. Her investigation is personal as the body is of a childhood friend, someone who knew the Park very well. Emme is convinced that he didn’t die as a result of an accident and begins an earnest investigation.

As she digs deeper into the case, it becomes apparent that a dangerous religious cult may be involved – the same cult Emme had been investigating before coming to Utah, which ended in failure.

Just as the case heats up and gets more intense, Emme’s relationship with her sister, Addie, gets more strained. They’ve been estranged and Emme still resents that she had to take care of all their mother’s belongings and then the funeral without Addie’s help. But when Addie’s life is in danger, Emme will stop at nothing to get her to safety.

For many, many years, the only mystery books I read were the book by Nevada Barr with the National Parks Ranger Anna Pigeon solving mysteries. I’m a tremendous fan of our National Parks and Monuments (I actually celebrated when I was finally old enough to get my lifetime pass!) so any book with a NP focus or setting will get my attention.

Author Nicole Maggi delivers a wonderfully exciting mystery and finds the perfect balance between character and story. There’s a lot of Emme’s family drama playing out with her sister, but it never seems to take over the story and we never feel that Emme is avoiding her investigations because of her sister. Both aspects of Emme’s life held my interest and I was anxious to see how they’d both resolve. I did expect that her relationship with Addie would be an on-going storyline.

Something I especially appreciated was how Emme’s past work came into play. Once during my read I stopped to see if this was a book two in a series. I really felt we were getting a lot of information about what had happened in the previous book. But finding nothing, I actually appreciated it more. Showing us a character who has a complicated past spices up that character. Bringing that past into play in the first book adds interest. And when done right, as Maggi does, it makes the reader pay a little closer attention as we unravel what has gone on before we got involved.

While I don’t see anything that says, outright, that this is to be the first in a series, I surely hope it is just a beginning.

Looking for a good book? A Murder in Zion by Nicole Maggi takes on the mantle of exciting National Parks mystery.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.

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A Murder in Zion

author: Nicole Maggi

publisher: Oceanview Publishing

ISBN: 9781608096381

paperback, 356 pages