HER FIRST MISTAKE

Thirteen years after the unsolved murder of her husband, Noelle Marshall is back in a new role that comports uneasily with the old.

Derrick Bell seemed destined for great things even before he was elected to the California state legislature. His wealthy parents, Stan and Catherine Bell, had appointed him; his brother, Jason; and his sister, Lora, as vice presidents in their company. The only blot in Derrick’s perfect portrait was Noelle, whom Catherine looked down on as a fortune hunter from the wrong side of the tracks. The family’s dreams crashed when Derrick was bashed to death in his palatial home outside Sacramento. FBI agents Alice Patmore and Oscar Wilson, who worked the case, could never convince themselves that Noelle, who also suffered a serious head wound that night, had arranged her own widowhood, and they were deaf to Jason’s insistence that Brendon Simon, who’d briefly been married to Noelle 24 years earlier, was the killer. By the time the authorities decide to reopen the case, Noelle, a detective with the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Department, would be an obvious choice to help on the case if she weren’t still a suspect. Although Noelle’s close to her sisters, Eve and Lucia Marshall, nothing’s brought her any closer to her late husband’s family. In fact, the most promising relation she develops is with FBI investigator Max Rhodes. Elliot is clearly more interested in launching a new franchise than in spinning a tightly wound mystery, and some readers will be more puzzled about what happened on that fatal night after the big reveal than before.

Let’s hope the promised sequels will give the heroine more breathing room to investigate murders in other people’s families.