Publisher: Crooked Lane 

ISBN: 978-1-64385-618-6

My old high school friend and his wife visited the other day. His wife and mine sat on one side of the living room to chat about grandchildren and having to be nice to neighbors, while Bob and I stayed on the other side to complain about work and having to shovel snow. At one point, Bob said that his greatest joy was to lock himself in his home office with a good cup of coffee. My immediate response was, “Really? Alone? You can enjoy a cup of coffee without anyone around to enjoy it with?”

Other than ending that sentence in a preposition, it seemed to be a perfectly reasonable reply—until I gave it a little more thought. Bob was right, of course. There are countless things we do alone that provide us with just the right amount of the peace, calm, quiet, introspection and decompression that we need from time to time—and having a flavorful cup of coffee is one of them. 

So is reading an enjoyable book. 

I was reminded of my conversation with Bob as I reached the middle of Grounds for Murder, which not so incidentally has a good cup of coffee all over it. I suppose the point here is that neither a cup of coffee nor a literary whodunit needs to demonstrably change your life in order to be perfectly useful. It can just be a pleasant bridge to whatever comes next. 

But Tara Lush has done more than just present a pleasant, flavorful mystery-with-a-smirk. She also gave reviewers a chance to use some smirk-filled metaphors with abandon, and get away with it! In other words, “Grounds for Murder” goes down like smooth cup of coffee. It gives you a nice jolt while you’re reading it. Given enough time, you won’t have to worry about it keeping you up all night long. Yet, it gives you something to look forward to the next day. And finally, when it’s all over, you feel as if you can look for something completely different just as easily as you can grab another just like it for another round of decompression.

In the tried-and-true whodunit style, Grounds for Murder gives us a dead body, that of a womanizing local, followed by a curious cast of caffeinated characters who may have had a motive to close the book on his life. There are several suspects, of course, not the least of which is the narrator, Lana, the recently-divorced ex-newspaper reporter who now owns Perkatory, the adorable little coffee shop at the heart of the story. The shop is in the touristy town of Devil’s Beach, down in Florida, just feet from where Lara finds the hunky corpse when she returns home from Miami. She had been there to attend a journalism awards ceremony that was emceed by her ex-husband and attended by many former colleagues who work at the newspaper from which she had recently been fired. The ex-husband and the ex-job are two reasons why it is almost a demonstrable pleasure for Lara to get back home to Devil’s Beach—except, of course, for that one little detail… you know, the dead body? 

And then, of course, there are others with whom she must interact, from the handsome police chief, to the dead man’s jilted lovers, to a new eccentric barista, to her own hippy dad. What’s more, there is a broad-spectrum and sometimes even peculiar list of cultural references spanning over a quarter of a century that may be the author’s seamless attempt to engage readers of all stripes and generations—among them Blurgh (from “30 Rock”), Jabba the Hutt (from the “Star Wars” franchise) and Stevie Nicks (from Fleetwood Mack). Or maybe that’s not the reason at all; maybe it’s just part of the rich persona that novelist Tara gave heroine Lara! 

These little details are mentioned solely to reiterate the fact that there is nothing wrong with a typical, conventional tongue-in-cheek whodunit when it’s brewed just right.  

The author knows her way around a page of prose. Tara Lush is a winner of the esteemed George C. Polk award for environmental journalism, and works for the Associated Press. Her story is told in a friendly, engaging style, sprinkled with self-deprecating humor, wry observations about people, places and professions, and some harmlessly clever turns of phrases. Indeed, that’s a pretty good way to turn the typical and the conventional into the enjoyable and the intriguing. 

When we were eighteen years old, my friend Bob and I drove from New York to Florida to spend some time at my grandmother’s senior community, check out Disney World, and do a few other touristy things. (And to not have to shovel snow for a while!) There was nothing about that trip that even in the most remote way reminds me of the Florida in Grounds for Murder. No, the Florida in this novel—at least Devil’s Beach itself—is as flavorful as a good cup of coffee, the way I had hoped it would be when Bob and I went down there just before starting college all those many years ago. In fact, I wouldn’t mind spending a few days in Lush’s literary world today—except for a few little details like… well… you know—the dead body?