Review: Sunset Beach

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Drue Campbell’s life is adrift. Out of a job and down on her luck, life doesn’t seem to be getting any better when her estranged father, Brice Campbell, a flamboyant personal injury attorney, shows up at her mother’s funeral after a twenty-year absence. Worse, he’s remarried – to Drue’s eighth grade frenemy, Wendy, now his office manager. And they’re offering her a job.

It seems like the job from hell, but the offer is sweetened by the news of her inheritance – her grandparents’ beach bungalow in the sleepy town of Sunset Beach, a charming but storm-damaged eyesore now surrounded by waterfront McMansions.

With no other prospects, Drue begrudgingly joins the firm, spending her days screening out the grifters whose phone calls flood the law office. Working with Wendy is no picnic either. But when a suspicious death at an exclusive beach resort nearby exposes possible corruption at her father’s firm, she goes from unwilling cubicle rat to unwitting investigator, and is drawn into a case that may – or may not – involve her father. With an office romance building, a decades-old missing persons case re-opened, and a cottage in rehab, one thing is for sure at Sunset Beach: there’s a storm on the horizon.

Genre: contemporary romance

Publication date: May 2019

Mature content: yes, but nothing overly graphical

Review: I loved reading Sunset Beach. The story is very compelling, with an interesting mix of romance and suspense - with more emphasis on the suspense. I really enjoyed the way the author managed to put in parallel two mysteries - the murder of a young employee in a nearby hotel and the disappearance of a local woman forty years before, and the way the two events could be connected in some way. 

I did find that in some places the plot moved a bit too slowly, and there were a few loose ends here and there too. In addition, I felt it was odd to see a thirty six year old woman behaving like a brat, especially at the beginning of the book. 

Despite my rants above, though, Sunset Beach is still a great book and I recommend it. 
 
Happy readings,