by Nina Simon ★★★☆☆
Mother-Daughter Murder Night centers around three generations of Rubicon women. Jacquline "Jack" Rubicon is the teenage daughter of Beth Rubicon. The two of them have carved out a life of their own on Elkhorn Slough, a swampy portion of the California coastline that empties into Monterey Bay. Beth's mother, Lana Rubicon, is a high-powered real estate businesswoman based in Los Angeles. When Lana unexpectedly falls ill, she reluctantly comes to live with Beth and Jack in their small home on the slough.
Jack has a job as a kayak tour guide, and during one of her tours, two of her guests discover a dead body in the slough, wearing the life jacket of the tour company. The person was supposed to be on Jack's tour the night before, which included a rowdy and distracting bachelor party. Did Jack somehow miss him? Did he become trapped and, as tour guide, is she ultimately responsible for his death? The police are called, and Jack is named a "person of interest" in the case.
With their daughter / granddaughter threatened, the other Rubicon women spring into action. Beth looks to protect Jack at all costs, keeping her safe at home and school and off the water. Lana, though, decides the safest way to protect Jack is to clear her from any suspicion by finding the actual murderer. She dives headlong into the case, relying on her professional experience as a power player in L.A. to manipulate the relative bumpkins of Elkhorn Slough into revealing clues, all while battling through her illness.
Mother-Daughter Murder Night is a debut novel, and more often than not that shows. The story is fairly predictable, and while it has some interesting moments, it was relatively short on twists or misdirection. The list of suspects can be counted on one hand, and the motives (and actual perpetrator) are clear well before the finale. First-time author Simon says in her bio that she "write(s) crime stories about strong women". This is certainly the case with Mother-Daughter Murder Night, but Simon does so at the expense of most male characters. All of the women in the book are confident, powerful and strong; by comparison, essentially all of the men are moronic, misogynistic, deeply flawed, or dead. It's not as over-the-top as Weyward, in which every male character was horrible, but it was not subtle. Here's one example:
"Nicoletti appeared to take her nonresponse as noncooperation. He curled his lip into a sneer. 'Look, lady, I get it. A younger man pays you some attention, flirts a little, makes you feel—how did my ex-wife put it?—makes you feel alive. And reason goes out the window.'”
I also realize that the vast majority of the readers of a book of a book called Mother-Daughter Murder Night are probably women, and so the imbalance between the sexes under Simon's pen may even be celebrated. But here's the thing: I think Simon does a disservice to those strong female characters. She doesn't need to compare them to weak men in order for them to be strong -- they do a fantastic job displaying their strength all on their own. Rather than elevating that strength, she distracts from it by unnecessarily lowering the bar of comparison.
Interestingly, perhaps the best parts of the book came after it finished. Much of the novel (minus the murder investigation) relates to Simon's life, and she tells that story in the Acknowledgments:
"This book was born out of desperation and love. Three years ago, my mother -- my smart, energetic, independent mother -- was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer. I changed my life and quit my job to care for her. We were grateful to be together, but as the surgeries and treatments mounted, we started to lose hope. We needed a distraction, a project that could connect us in joy instead of anxiety. This book was that project."
Only a monster could rate it less than 4 stars after a heartfelt explanation like that, right? Well, I am that monster. While part of me wants to round up, and I was interested enough to finish it, it's a notch below a 4-star book for me. I commend author Simon for the effort and dedication to crank out a first novel in the midst of her mother's illness -- and to have it earn a nod from Reese's Book Club, no less! -- but with the myriad of options available in the genre, my recommendation is to skip this one.