Sunday, April 26, 2020

review: hello, summer by mary kay andrews

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When Sarah Conley Hawkins (who prefers Conley) learns her new employer has lost all its funding and shut down, she heads home to Silver Bay, FL instead of Washington, D.C. She's a newspaper reporter and no one is hiring despite her skills. As it happens, her grandma is the owner of their hometown weekly newspaper and her sister runs it. While her grandma is thrilled to have Conley home, Grayson is resentful of her younger sister who left for the big city and rarely returned. There's plenty of tension, but then Conley happens across a fatal single-car crash. The fatality happens to be the beloved Representative Symmes Robinette, who just happens to have a scandal in his past, and whose car crash may not have been an accident. Soon Conley is entangled in not only the Robinette story but her own personal dramas.

Hello, Summer contains a bit of filler as well as some inconsistencies regarding ages and dietary habits. Mary Kay Andrews also makes the same mistake that many others do and conflates the generational group Millennial with young person. Both Grayson and Conley make remarks about the generation as though they are not members despite their ages of 36 and 34 placing them firmly in the Millennial group. Hello, Summer also falls short when it comes time to wrap up the mysteries. A few are solved, but other big parts of the plot are left as loose ends. It is a gripping story though with enough twists to keep the pages turning until the end.
4/5
Review copy provided by the publisher, St. Martin's Press.

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