A lighthearted whodunnit about a grandmother-mother-daughter trio of amateur sleuths. Think: Gilmore Girls, but with murder.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from the third chapter of Nina Simon’s Mother-Daughter Murder Night, which is out September 5th.
High-powered businesswoman Lana Rubicon has a lot to be proud of:her keen intelligence, impeccable taste, and the L.A. real estate empire she’s built. But when she finds herself trapped 300 miles north of the city, convalescing in a sleepy coastal town with her adult daughter Beth and teenage granddaughter Jack, Lana is stuck counting otters instead of square footage—and hoping that boredom won’t kill her before the cancer does.
Then Jack—tiny in stature but fiercely independent—happens upon a dead body while kayaking. She quickly becomes a suspect in the homicide investigation, and the Rubicon women are thrown into chaos. Beth thinks Lana should focus on recovery, but Lana has a better idea. She’ll pull on her wig, find the true murderer, protect her family, and prove she still has power.
With Jack and Beth’s help, Lana uncovers a web of lies, family vendettas, and land disputes lurking beneath the surface of a community populated by folksy conservationists and wealthy ranchers. But as their amateur snooping advances into ever-more dangerous territory, the headstrong Rubicon women must learn to do the one thing they’ve always resisted: depend on each other.
CHAPTER THREE
February 4 (Seventeen Weeks Later)
LANA BOLTED UP at the sound of a scream outside her window. She’d been in Elkhorn Slough four months now: long enough to recognize the predatory snarls and howls that filled the night, not nearly long enough to sleep through them. She heard another shriek, then a rustle. There was a killer on the prowl again.
Lana turned on the light and pushed aside the mountain of pill bottles to get to her binoculars. It was 1:30 a.m. Another sleepless night courtesy of the wonders of modern medicine. Lana glared at the unfinished dinner smoothie on the dresser, her throat seizing as she caught a whiff of its chalky blueberry froth. No one had told her chemotherapy would wreak havoc on her senses. Lana could now smell a decaying deer from a mile away, but she couldn’t taste anything. Everything she put in her mouth turned to damp wool, gummy and itching to get stuck in her throat.
There were lots of things about cancer she hadn’t been prepared for. The brain surgeries had gone well. But then the Stanford doctors in their double-breasted suits informed her they could not slice out the small army of tumors flanking her left lung. This was not a brush with death to laugh about over cocktails. It was a long-term condition, which was decidedly less glamorous.
The chemotherapy stole her energy. Then her hair, sticking to her comb in terrifying clumps until she took an electric shaver to it on a tearstained, wine-spilled afternoon. And then she lost her work. Her two-hundred-unit condo project in Westchester went to a Beverly Hills airhead who carried a hairless dog in her purse. A thirty-year-old shark who wore mirrored sunglasses indoors stole the Hacienda Lofts account. She kept her health insurance, thankfully, but everything else dried up. At first her assistant, Janie, was indignant, relaying each new slight in breathless, high-pitched voicemails as if someone were personally nailing the girl’s acrylic fingernails to a telephone pole. But Lana could hardly muster the energy to keep up the fiction of her imaginary foot condition, let alone raise the dead over another young buck who wanted to steal her perch on top of LA’s commercial real estate market. The day before Thanksgiving, Janie called to tell her she’d found a growth opportunity somewhere else. Lana was surprised to find she didn’t really care. She hung up the phone without saying goodbye.
Lana rang in the New Year with no hair, no business, and no clear
answer on when it might all be over. “Too soon to tell,” the doctors intoned, as if she were a crystal ball of maladies. After three months of chemotherapy, she was now just two weeks away from her first full set of scans since treatment had started. Soon she’d know if she was improving, or if she was stuck in the back bedroom of her daughter’s shabby house forever.
A death sentence. That’s what it felt like. Even on the good days, Lana had nothing to do and no one to do it with. Beth was at work. Jack was at school or out paddling on the water. Lana hadn’t even opened the third care package from Gloria, which she knew would be stuffed with romance novels, crystals, and other worthless fantasies. All day, she watched life teem outside her window: egrets hunting along the banks, otters clutching their fuzzy babies to their chests, kayakers winding in and out of the shifting tides. She felt like a bystander, auditioning for a role that didn’t interest her. No one asking her for sign-off. No one waiting for her opinion. A life of irrelevance. It was almost as depressing as the cancer.
TWO A.M. AND SHE was still awake. The shrieks had ended, but the beach was alive with a chittering, scuffling sound. Lana pulled up the window blinds and lifted the binoculars in search of its source.
The moon was full above the slough, and the whole world looked flattened out in grayscale: wispy clouds, grainy fields, fast-moving current. Glints of moonlight bounced off the water where harbor seals surfaced, hunting crabs along the mud flats that edged the slice of beach behind the house. Beach was an optimistic word for the narrow strip of grit, weeds, and long-dead jellyfish that stretched from Beth’s scraggly neighborhood to an old power plant and the marina. Twice a day, the bank got swallowed up in a swirl of river and seawater, then spat out again at low tide, bearing tree branches, old tires, and whatever else the Pacific Ocean didn’t want.
She scanned the beach with the binoculars. At the far end, she saw sand flying into the air beneath a set of furry paws and gleaming eyes. Her shrieking demon was a bobcat, digging frantically, a dead rodent flopping in its mouth. Was it hollowing out a den in which to enjoy its kill? Or did it plan to stash the carcass for later? Whatever its intent, she hoped it would stop making a racket soon.
Lana dropped her binoculars and stared across the water. Everything here was mud and vermin. She missed her condo in Santa Monica, where the only late-night sounds were automotive, the only wildlife hypoallergenic designer pets. Los Angeles was alive in a way she understood, a buzzing hive she’d wrestled her way to the center of, as a queen, or at least not a drone. But Elkhorn Slough belonged to someone else, to creatures dark and hidden.
A flicker on the far side of the slough pierced Lana’s thoughts. It was a small circle of light, weak and yellowed, bouncing wildly through the scrub. Lana raised her binoculars and started scanning the murky hillside in slow horizontal passes. Finally she caught it. A person with a flashlight, stumbling down a faint deer path toward the north bank. The man—was it a man?—was pushing something. He was wearing an oversize coat, a hat, and gloves, bundled up against the February chill.
A wheelbarrow. That’s what he was pushing. At two in the morning.
Lana frowned. She’d always been a city girl, but still. Surely there weren’t farming tasks to be done in the middle of the night.
The man was moving fast, down toward the brackish water. The wheelbarrow dipped and surged in and out of view as he charged through the high grass. Either his cargo was heavy or the ground was uneven. Or both.
He stopped at a low point in the marsh Lana couldn’t quite make out. He was down there for a couple minutes, spreading something out maybe, or arranging something in place. Lana found herself holding her breath, waiting for him to rise. Instead, there was a splash. The man shot back up, hat first, dark shoulders. Then he turned and stared straight across the slough at Lana.
Lana reared back, spooked. The man couldn’t possibly see her from all that way in the dark. And yet. She could have sworn she felt the heat in his eyes.
It was impossible. Lana realized the warmth was coming from her own body, from her intense focus and shortened breath. She felt a sudden, fierce longing to be this man—not a farmer, but someone out in the world doing something, something physical and definitive and certain, while others slept. That was the life she was meant to live. To be the doer, not the watcher.
But here she was, clutching her binoculars. She envied the man, standing there on the north bank, breathing white puffs of air into the night. He stared out over the water for a full minute. Then he turned away. Lana yanked the blinds shut and fell back onto her pillow. She felt suddenly spent, swollen and cracked, as if she’d wasted a day lying out at the beach in full sun. When she peered through the glass again, the man was gone. The shuffling labor of the bobcat had ended. The only sound was the great horned owls, coming home to roost.
