Burned

When we last saw L.A.-based private detective Regan Reilly, she'd recently become engaged. On the opening pages of Burned, Regan gets a call from Kit, urging her to come to Hawaii for one last girls' weekend before she ties the knot. The snowstorm of the century is blanketing the East Coast. Regan can't get to New York to visit her fiancé, Jack "no relation" Reilly, and Kit can't get back home to Connecticut. So Regan packs a bag and is on her way.

At the Waikiki Waters Playground and Resort, where Kit has been staying, the body of Dorinda Dawes, who wrote the hotel newsletter, washes ashore. Around her neck is an exquisite and historically valuable shell lei that once belonged to a Hawaiian princess, a lei that had been stolen from the Seashell Museum in Honolulu thirty years before.

Will Brown, the manager of the resort, doesn't believe that it's an accidental drowning. In the three months Dorinda had worked in Hawaii, she had become a controversial character who had a reputation for pointing out the very worst in people. Will is afraid that she was murdered and that the murderer might still be in their midst, perhaps a guest at the resort.

Besides Dorinda's death, strange things have been happening at Waikiki Waters. Luggage has gone missing, food has been tainted, and tubes of suntan lotion are being dropped into the toilets. Could someone be trying to bring down the whole establishment?

Lucky for Will, he happens to meet Regan Reilly in the hotel lobby and convinces her to get on the case. Since Kit is infatuated with a new love interest -- Steve, a fabulously wealthy thirty-five-year-old retiree living on Oahu who is eager to spend time with her -- Regan is free to take the job. But once she starts digging, she comes across all sorts of suspicious characters. And the closer she gets to the truth, the more danger she's in.

Can Regan find out what really happened to Dorinda before it's too late for someone else? Before it's too late for her?

Is the culprit someone from the tour group visiting from Hudville, a town where it rains 89 percent of the time? Is it one of the employees at the hotel? Could it be Jazzy, a social climber who has a job house-sitting on the Big Island? Just who had it in for Dorinda? Regan's investigation takes the reader on a fast-paced ride from Waikiki to the Big Island of Hawaii and back again.

Carol Higgins Clark's trademark light touch, humor, and quirky characters make Burned yet another wonderfully unpredictable mystery, complete with a thoroughly satisfying denouement.