MURDER ON THE MENU
A Nikki Hunter Mystery
Nancy Skopin
Skopin’s first entry in her Nikki Hunter series is an auspicious beginning to what promises to be a series with serious staying power. Living on her sailboat in the small northern California town of Redwood City, and after barely two years on her own, getting only such bread-and-butter jobs as employee surveillance and checking on errant spouses, Nikki is brought up short when a wealthy socialite, dissatisfied with the progress the police have been making, asks her to check into the brutal murder of her daughter, a girl who had everything, yet earned her living as an exotic dancer in a sleazy club. Nikki takes the case and runs with it, applying her own combination of streetwise smarts and bulldog tenacity and getting more than her share of OJT as things heat up. There are plenty of turns and tension as the murders mount, along with the danger, but the great pleasure here is in the characters and the solid sense of reality in Nikki’s world. Everything rings true. The story is taut and the surprises keep coming, but without the kind of gratuitous pyrotechnics that get in the way of so many tales today. Readers will look forward to what Skopin has in store next.