MARY KELIIKOA'S PAGE: The Misty Pines Mysteries series

KILLER TRACKS (A Misty Pines Mystery #3)
MARY KELIIKOA
Level Best Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$5.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A peaceful retreat. A maze of smoke and murder. Is their remote getaway about to become a death trap?

Sheriff Jax Turner is worried about going off-grid and leaving his young team of deputies behind. But while his getaway with his ex is meant to help them reconnect, Jax is distracted by signs of a break-in at their rented lookout.

After a string of unsettling events and an approaching wildfire turn their isolated retreat into a danger zone, he’s stunned to find a dead body with marks tying it to a killer he put away a decade ago.

Terrified his attempt at reconciliation has led them both into a fatal setup, Jax rushes back to his estranged wife before she joins the list of victims. But his dedication to serving and protecting could become an Achilles heel as other players join them among the darkening trees.

Can he fight his way out of the woods before the flames of revenge consume everything?

Killer Tracks is the tense third book in the Misty Pines Mystery Series. If you like tangled relationships, edge-of-your-seat suspense, and small town sheriff procedurals, then you’ll love Mary Keliikoa’s page-turning game of cat-and-mouse.

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My Review: Tangled emotions, a History that beats any failure of your own relationships, and a stressful job as The Crime-Solver in a town as magnetic to crime as Midsomer or St Mary Mead...I am in my happy place. The stakes are very high, the people are familiar enough to be my real life neighbors, and the setting makes me pine away for a small-town life that, if I had it, would make me feel desperate and trapped.

Jax and Abby are still trying to fix what got broken by the awfulness of their shared world...he's an ex-Portland cop (bet they want him back now) and her FBI world...because they just can't quit each other. So while they're off in the patch-up place aka back of beyond, Rachel the deputy is trying her goddamnedest to solve an arson covering up a murder...when in flies her dad, delivering a crucial cold-case clue like a gangrenous carrier pigeon. (Me no likee daddums; he was also Jax's Portland force partner...my hackles will not stay down when he's around.)

Into Abby and Jax's doomed privacy wafts Hannah...wait, who? Exactly! Who's she, where'd she come from, and when's she leaving?

So a series'-worth of Jax pining unrequitedly after Abby, a murder case Rachel really wants to solve without some old man buttin' in (be it her old man or Jax's predecessor as chief), and a serial-killer cold case. Have I forgotten anything?

You'll want to read for yourselves, so I ain't tellin'.

*eville cackle*

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DEADLY TIDES (A Misty Pines Mystery #2)
MARY KELIIKOA
Level Best Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A missing surf legend. Waterlogged clues. Can he trust his gut instincts to end the wave of murder?

Sheriff Jax Turner is learning to live again. Holding tight to the hope of reconciling with his FBI agent ex-wife, the wary man is determined to keep his focus on his coastal Oregon community. And after a concerned brother requests a welfare check, Jax is troubled to find the absent surf shop owner's tracks lead to a pool of blood.

Now investigating a potential homicide, Turner chases a tip from his former spouse about a severed foot found on the beach. But when a torrent of leads links the victim to a politician's son, a jealous competitor, and a get-straight program for youth, the steadfast lawman fears layers of lies and secret agendas will keep him from stopping a vicious killer.

Can he unravel the fatal agenda before he's the next corpse to wash ashore?

If you like flawed heroes, gritty crimes, and dark twists and turns, then you'll love Deadly Tides, the chilling second book in Mary Keliikoa's Misty Pines Mystery Series.

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My Review: Local surfer dies mysteriously; unconnected human foot washes up on local beach, handled by Jax's much pined-after ex-wife the FBI agent, who knows he can handle it so hands responsibility over; lying liars lie and abuse people...okay, it's Misty Pines. Good to be back.

Abby, the ex-wife and FBI agent, gets a third person PoV like Jax because we need to know things he couldn't and she feels reluctant to tell his simping-for-her self. It helped me keep details clear in my head. I can't help but wonder why her FBI partner Olek is so present...but I like Jax getting the eager young Rachel onto his deputeam. He's settling in to the job of being The Crime Solver for Misty Pines. He's not as unsure of himself. It begins to feel more like a set team is forming.

I confess I do not see Abby's side of their divorce. It doesn't matter much because, unless decades of series-mystery reading and recognizing the need for ma'at to be restored, they *will* get back together. In their profession of law enforcement, each is the other's ideal mate. This time apart will, I predict, pay dividends.

You will pay an attention tax. This book does not hold to a spanking pace as it privileges introspection and the unending process of grieving. Rather we're shown the emotional gyrations in Jax and, to a lesser extent, Abby, as they circle each other simply by virtue of sharing the most important trait of them all: Values.

I think this book would be so fraught as to be meaningless if one had not read book one, Hidden Pieces (q.v.). The cast, the pace, the fuller backstory, all help defray the attention cost of the story's inward focus. Not to be skipped, but don't start here.

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HIDDEN PIECES (A Misty Pines Mystery #1)
MARY KELIIKOA
Level Best Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
99¢ ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Sheriff Jax Turner is staring down the barrel of his broken past. On the brink of ending it all, he feels like a failure following his daughter's tragic passing and his subsequent divorce. But when a schoolgirl vanishes and her backpack is found in a sex offender's backseat, the weary lawman drags himself into action and vows to nail one last sociopath.

Shocked to discover the teen's aunt had lost her life in an abduction years prior, the devastating outcome that he's taken personally, Jax believes the killer has returned with a vengeance. But as the desperate cop frantically hunts down a mysterious relative in search of a suspect, the girl's time keeps ticking away...

Can the jaded sheriff take down the culprit in time to bring the young girl home alive?

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My Review: We meet Jax in extremis...the very worst thing possible to happen to a person has happened, the depressingly most-common fallout of that hideous disaster has occurred and he is (he thinks) ready for The End.

He is not.

He is summoned back to participation in life by the disappearance of Allison, a teenaged missing person with frantic parents. Jax can gird himself to be involved, as he badly wants to give someone else the ending he did not get. All set in the scenic, peacfully beautiful coastal-Oregon town of Misty Pines. As a small town, it is of course a place of unspoken stuff Everybody Knows (or think they know) but which Jax, formerly a Portland detective, isn't privy to. And doesn't know he doesn't know.

All of this feeds the man's deep, well-entrenched anxiety about his skills, about his past coming home to roost, about his misery being without his FBI agent ex-wife who abandoned him...After. It's real, it happens, people are not their best selves when crushed by terrible grief. It does occupy a good deal of his mental energy, though not simply as plot dressing. Trust Author Keliikoa. She has a plan.

Why I wasn't offering nosegays and wreaths of stars comes down to the ending. It is something you'll resonate with or you won't. I felt it introduced more complexity than was necessary, even for a series mystery. But...and this is crucial to know...it was not simply pulled outta nowhere and tacked on. As a first in series read, I'll pin my reservations to my mind's corkboard and see if my issues are used to good advantage in a later book.

Definitely a series I recommend you pursue with me!

DIFFICULT LIGHT, blindness is more than physical, more than emotional...existential

DIFFICULT LIGHT
TOMÁS GONZÁLEZ (tr. Andrea Rosenberg)
Archipelago Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$6.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Grappling with his son’s death, the painter David explores his grief through art and writing, etching out the rippled landscape of his loss.

Over twenty years after his son’s death, nearly blind and unable to paint, David turns to writing to examine the deep shades of his loss. Despite his acute pain, or perhaps because of it, David observes beauty in the ordinary: in the resemblance of a woman to Egyptian portraits, in the horseshoe crabs that wash up on Coney Island, in the foam gathering behind a ferry propeller; in these moments, González reveals the world through a painter’s eyes. From one of Colombia’s greatest contemporary novelists, Difficult Light is a daring meditation on grief, written in candid, arresting prose.

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My Review: Waiting to die. Needing to die. Suffering that no one in a god-run universe should be required to bear. Taking one's power back from an uncaring (or cruel) Providence and giving the order to extinguish suffering and life both. It is what David is doing; it is what Jacobo, his son, did.

In summer at a certain point you have the illusion that the days last forever. I didn't want night to come, because then I'd have to acknowledge that time was passing; that life was passing us over, crushing us with its wheels and gears. But only light, ever elusive, is eternal. And the light on the water beside the churning propeller of the boat, however much I studied it and reworked it, I was unable to find a way to capture it completely – that light that contains shadows, that contains death, and is so contained within them."

David, a painter now going blind, is in his last days, revisiting in his mind the horrifying moment his severely injured, agonized son's assisted suicide is finally released from his torment.

It was a horrible thing to read; it is there from literal page-one introduction to the story. The amount of torment in reading a book about the death of your young-adult child, one capable of making this decision for himself legally (in Colombia, anyway), was terrible. After five years I can come tell you I think the writing as translated by Andrea Rosenberg is lovely, spare and evocative; the story involving; but in the end, what I felt was the overwhelming grief and outrage at the cruelty of life.

Catharsis? Yes, but in a curious way, no...how cathartic is death on a storybook's page, really? For me it's more the intensity of a father looking at blindness, death, and the awful unanswered question "why?" directly for the last time. There are moments of squick, as David is a bog-standard boomer man misogyny and all; his wife tells some jokes that clang in twenty-first century ears; there are unpleasant ethnic humor moments.

Granting those facts their weight, your decision about reading the book is better guided by your ability to be in the headspace of a man who can't quite ever feel at peace with a world so vicious as to take his child and leave him behind to mourn.

Right there with you, my dude.

SEVENTHBLADE, Indigenous author tells powerful anti-colonialist fantasy

SEVENTHBLADE
TONIA LAIRD
ECW Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.95 trade paper, available now

The author shared her maps on her website! : https://tonialaird.com/2025/06/18/the-maps-of-seventhblade/ These are included in the final book.

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: For readers of N.K. Jemisin and Rebecca Roanhorse, a fast-paced, anti-colonial action-adventure fantasy that explores twisted power dynamics and the effects of settler colonialism

After the murder of T’Rayles’s adopted son, the infamous warrior and daughter of the Indigenous Ibinnas returns to the colonized city of Seventhblade, ready to tear the streets asunder in search of her son’s killer. T’Rayles must lean into the dangerous power of her inherited sword and ally herself with questionable forces, including the Broken Fangs, an alliance her mother founded, now fallen into greed and corruption, and the immortal Elraiche, a powerful and manipulative deity exiled from a faraway land. Navigating the power shifts in a colonized city on the edge and contending with a deadly new power emerging from within, T’Rayles must risk everything to find the answers, and the justice, she so desperately desires.

Loaded with complex characters and intricately staged action, and set in a fragmented, fascinating world of dangerous magics and cryptic gods, Seventhblade is a masterful new fantasy adventure from a bright, emerging Indigenous voice.

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My Review: Losing your child is torturous. Losing him but not having a way to achieve closure on your grief? Never think that will not turn any parent into a giant ball of rage.

T’Rayles uses that rage, and a unique bond with her sword's beinghood, to hatch revenge plots involving a god, a world of hurt, and the end of her people's colonial subjection. She's going to do it all with the directed participation of Elraiche, cost her and the world what it may.

Proof to me, all that, that the most fun-to-read stories are those that center people with super-clear motives, goals that do not admit of defeat, and the rizz to command the help they need. T'Rayles is morally grey in her quest for revenge, in her need to make the world over so what happened to her never happens again. Her deal with Elraiche does not get made innocently, she expects damage, as much of it collateral as is not...but the goal is paramount: Revenge.

At times Author Laird, a most eloquent writer with a solidly developed command of evocative imagery, uses it more freely than the demands of plot can support. Her other work in the comics and games industry makes that unsurprising. There are some combat scenes halfway through that do not move at the pace one hopes to find in those times (surprisingly). The first third has more of Elraiche than seems needed, you might wonder why we're getting his PoV as much as I did but trust Author Laird. The way he is included pays off at the end.

The ending is...impactful. I found myself putting my device down and just thinking through what I'd read. Looking for my emotional teeth after Author Laird pounded 'em outta me. Whatever issues I'd had, particularly around Elraiche and around Dellan (the dead son's father, who had very little time with the reader), failed to diminish my impressed appreciation for the complicated but inevitable resolution I was offered.

I'd offer a full five stars had I had a map [UPDATE: The author shared her maps: https://tonialaird.com/2025/06/18/the-maps-of-seventhblade/ These are included in the final book.] of the world created for this story, especially since it's ripe for a sequel; and had it felt...fresher...less like a beautiful cart but one in a line of the many traveling revenge road.

The Indigenous inflections of the anti-colonial message put that half-star back. This story might not break new ground but it builds a beautiful new home on the Earth it occupies.

THE EDGE OF GUILT might better be called the swamp or morass of guilt...but guilt there is

THE EDGE OF GUILT
DAVID MIRALDI
Kindle edition (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Heather was only fifteen when she died by suicide.
Her father wants justice.
The system wants silence.

After his daughter’s tragic death, Dennis is devastated, convinced that her psychiatrist is to blame. Desperate for accountability, he seeks an attorney to settle the score.

Enter Paul Schofield, a struggling attorney who impulsively takes the case, hoping for a quick settlement. But the deeper he digs, the more he uncovers buried secrets, conflicting loyalties, and ethical dilemmas that shake him to his core. As courtroom tensions rise, relationships fracture, alliances shift, and the line between justice and greed begins to blur.

Inspired by true events, The Edge of Guilt is a gripping legal drama that delves into the gray areas of justice, morality, and grief—captivating readers from the first page and resonating long after the final verdict.

Perfect for fans of Defending Jacob by William Landay, Reversible Errors by Scott Turow, and Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, this story blends courtroom suspense with emotional depth and real-world ethical complexity.

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My Review: Legal dramas don't come much more grabby than a grieving father trying to wrap his head around his child's death. Failing that, he sets out to get revenge, or as he thinks of it, "Justice."

The big issue is an Eternal Verity: NEVER START A LAWSUIT IF YOU'RE GUILTY. Of what, well, look at Oscar Wilde if you just want a case study of why this is the world's worst idea. The author's a civil lawyer, so no doubt accustomed to lying clients. I'm not all the way convinced that isn't why there's a twist at the latter stages of the story...was that really a good idea is not settled in my mind.

The real characters here are the lawyer and the father. They eat all our attention, seemingly by design as there aren't any female characters including the dead daughter who speak much still less say anything important.

I won't say it was my favorite read of May 2025 but I never rolled my eyes and resisted picking it up. The comps above seem accurate to me. I liked the Landay book pretty much exactly the same intensity as I liked this one, and for similar reasons of moral complexity. If you like courtroom dramas, this definitely makes its bones there; if you're after a solid tale of grief managed poorly, here you go; if you like a surprise ending, the kettle's on in Author Miraldi's story kitchen.