Gloria's Reviews > Grounds for Murder

Grounds for Murder is a fun debut novel with the setting of a small beach town in South Florida and some colorful characters. What fun to have the story revolve around a coffee shop with the Gulf of Mexico close by.
Lana Lewis moved home to Devil's Beach from Miami after her husband cheated on her. She needed to leave to lick her wounds and her dad wants her to run her family's coffee shop, Perkatory. It was her mom's dream and her dad has been running it since her mom died. He wants to slow down now. She is working hard to make the shop a success and one way is by entering a state wide barista contest held in Devil's Beach. She is betting on her barista, flirty Italian Fab Bellucci to help her in the contest but he leaves without notice to work with a competitor. Thankfully, Erica, a customer with experience as a barista had shown up a couple days prior. But then Lana finds Fab's body behind the shop. He had fallen from the roof of the shop where he lived in the apartment. He loved to entertain his lady friends on the roof. Could he have fallen accidentally, committed suicide, or been pushed?
Handsome police chief Noah Garcia thinks it could be suicide but Lana thinks that with all Fab's huge group of adoring women fans and girlfriends, he wouldn't kill himself. Since she worked the crime beat for a newspaper in Miami and the love of journalism is still in her blood, she uses her skills to investigate and write an article for the local newspaper. She finds some interesting things about Fab that she wasn't aware of and meets some interesting characters.
This is a great debut book with a mystery that kept me guessing about happened to Fab and who was involved. The storytelling made the setting easy to picture and this an entertaining read.
I hope to see more of Lana, her new best friend Erica, her wacky hippie father, her swoony new friend Noah and her new puppy Stanley, formerly owned by Fab.
I received a complimentary ARC from Crooked Lane Books through NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are mine only.