VILLAINS

A young North Carolina woman is set to inherit a fortune—but is it tied to a murder?

In Fulton’s second installment of a mystery series, Raleigh resident Beck Graham’s long-overdue visit to her grandmother comes too late. When Beck arrives at Cheyenne Graham’s Montana ranch, she finds Gran dead. There’s a bruise on Gran’s temple and a broken window, plus a “soft tuft of brown fur waves in the breeze, snagged on the glass.” When Police Chief Clay Munro arrives—“a fine specimen of manhood for sure”—and sees the body and bit of fur, he declares the death was due to Gran’s angering “The Bear.” What? The handyman boarding up Gran’s broken window chimes in: “Ain’t nobody make it once The Bear marks ’em.” Beck doesn’t buy the Bear talk; she thinks Gran was murdered. But Navy SEAL Eli Walker, a man Beck fantasizes about kissing—he has muscles in places she “didn’t know humans had”—doesn’t dismiss the legitimacy of the eerie Bear legend. Then Beck finds a note Gran wrote on the label of a bottle of essential oil that reads: “The Bear finally got me.” Beck loves oils, and she credits using them for her weight loss and for saving a dying horse that breathed in a mixture that included thyme and peppermint. Murder, men, and oils aside, Beck must decide if she’ll stay in Bear country as the heir apparent to Gran’s multimillion-dollar Three Forks Ranch. Along with the Bear theory, the story strains credulity with the facts of Beck’s inheritance. She stands to receive a fortune from a grandmother Beck hasn’t seen or heard from since the protagonist was a chubby 5-year-old. As an adult, Beck can be delightful; for example, when she meets Clay, she notes: “Those eyes run down my figure, and I tuck my tummy in a little tighter.” The book is part romance, part mystery, and part advertorial for essential oils. Two out of three are handled effectively; the oils content distracts from the other two. But oils are important to the author, who dedicates her novel to “all my ‘oily’ people.”

Some creepiness, some crime, and a charming protagonist.