Kira hasn’t returned to her hometown in East Texas since her mother’s supposed suicide. Kira has always believed her mother was murdered, but no one agrees with her. Now, after all these years, she is returning for the vow renewal of a childhood frenemy and to retrieve her mother’s memoir from her grandmother. What secrets does the memoir hold? Kira is ready to shake things up in A LIKEABLE WOMAN by May Cobb.
Kira is hesitant to reunite with her difficult grandmother and distant sister Katie, but she is looking forward to seeing her childhood crush and best friend, Jack Sherman. Jack just understands Kira and her reluctance to return home. Jack’s now a married neurosurgeon with a three-year-old son, but that doesn’t deter Kira from wanting to reconnect and involve Jack in her mission. When Kira arrives at her grandmother’s house, she knows it is going to be a difficult visit. When Kira obtains her mother’s memoir, she starts to understand her mother’s life and struggles. As she reads further, she learns more about the fateful night of the bonfire and her mother’s suspicious death.
As the weekend festivities continue, Kira finds herself back in the world of passive-aggressive friendships, gossip, backstabbing, innuendos, and ostracizing. Kira’s mother Sadie was a free spirit and ruffled some feathers during her time in suburbia. Now Kira’s receiving threatening texts and messages warning her to back off. As the party and the drinking roll on, Kira simultaneously reads the memoir and searches out the truth. Will she find what she’s looking for, or will the truth get her killed?
A LIKEABLE WOMAN by May Cobb is a domestic suspense thriller that captures the story of a complicated thirty-eight-year-old woman reconciling her mother’s life and death. The story is a slow burn that starts strongly, meanders in the middle, and ends with a nice bang. It feels like a guilty pleasure with vibrant writing, a snarky feel, lots of liquor, and people behaving badly (past and present). The dual timeline was presented well and the story had a distinctive, dark, and vindictive feel. Some elements of the story did not work well, though. Kira sometimes came off as self-centered, short-sighted, and naïve and I could not grasp why Kira would not read her mother’s memoir in its entirety in one sitting, instead of stringing it out over several events. While I didn't fully connect with some of the storytelling elements, overall, the writing, characterizations, and setting were well done, and I will seek out further books by May Cobb.
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