What never happened A thriller

Bestseller Hall's arresting if problematically plotted latest (after We Lie Here) centers on Coco Weber, who has spent much of her life dealing with death. At 15, Coco's parents and older brother were murdered in their Catalina Island home; after college, she became an obituary writer for the Los Angeles Times. The sudden end of her marriage and her career 19 years after the murders force the fragile journalist back to Catalina, where the house she inherited and a fresh obit gig at the local paper await. Immediately, though, Coco is slammed from all sides: there's venom from her Aunt Gwen, who's been living in the now ramshackle family home and considers it hers to keep; the release of the man convicted of killing her family, who's been exonerated by DNA evidence; and what seems a disproportionate number of elderly women's obituaries to write. Despite the ages of her subjects, Coco suspects they may have been murdered, and that their deaths might be connected to her own family tragedy. While Coco and her aunt are complex, convincing characters, the other major players prove little more than game pieces in a plot that careens into preposterousness around its climactic twists. Hall manages plenty of intrigue, but the results are uneven. Agent: Jill Marsal, Marsal Lyon Literary. (Aug.)

A girl's life is forever altered when her family is murdered. Back in 2001, Colette "Coco" Weber and her family were among the very few Black residents of Avalon on California's Santa Catalina Island. Her mother, a lawyer, and her father, a teacher at the island's high school, had tired of commuting from the mainland. Coco was a teen looking for adventure when she came home one night to find entirely too much of it: Her parents and her brother, a football star, were all dead. Nineteen years later, Coco, at odds with her actor husband, Micah, returns to Avalon to work on the local paper owned by her college friend Maddy, where she writes offbeat obituaries. Then she learns that the man who was convicted of murdering her family is being released on new DNA evidence. Although she's inherited her parents' Avalon house, it's been occupied by her aunt Gwen, who, thinking of it as her own, switches between loving and hostile. The house is a mess, but Coco, who's liberated a valuable ring from Micah, plans to use the proceeds from its sale to fix up the place. Soon she's receiving racist threats and offers to buy her home that make her equally furious. Slowly a pattern emerges: elderly widows who own their own homes have been found dead in unexpected places, the police writing off each case as a natural death. Only her fellow reporter and soon-to-be lover, handsome, rich Noah Bancroft, believes in Coco's idea that a serial killer is at work. Troubled by panic attacks and her inability to discern what's real in either past or present, Coco seeks the truth as Covid ravages California. A character-rich, sleep-depriving thriller. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.