Best Be Prepared

October 1, 2021
Looking for a fresh start, Nora Best tows her Airstream trailer from Wyoming back to her hometown of Chateau, Maryland. Nearly there, Nora is almost cut off by a bright green Kia. Further on, she sees the Kia pulled over by a local cop. Hoping to find healing peace in her childhood home, she instead discovers that her mother, Penelope, recovering from a fall, needs assistance. In town the next morning, Nora learns that the driver of the Kia, Robert, a young Black man, the nephew of Penelope's former housekeeper, has been shot and killed by the white officer, who was Nora's high-school boyfriend. As a witness, however fleeting, Nora is drawn into the investigation, following offhand comments by a quartet of local busybodies. Deftly weaving Nora's efforts to reestablish relationships into her realization that she must face unhappy truths about her past and her former friends, Florio, a former journalist, uses storytelling to explore the persistence of racism and the far-reaching damage it inflicts.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 15, 2023
Nora Best and her Airstream trailer, Electra, have resettled again, this time on a thinly populated peninsula on Washington's Pacific coast. Among her seventh-grade students is the unruly Damien Austin, stepson of a local developer. Following a routine tsunami drill, one of her students finds a body: Ward Austin, Damien's father and leader of the local environmental group opposed to development. To engage and distract the students, Nora and a fellow teacher collaborate on a class project, a newspaper presenting research and local opinion about the tsunami tower being built as a refuge for the townspeople. A chance comment to one student inspires Nora's search for Ward's killer. With Ward's murder as a backdrop, Florio explores the impact divorce has on the children who must balance the separateness of their parents' lives and the conflict between the desire to preserve nature and a bucolic lifestyle and the need for economic development. Exposing the rifts in the small community. Florio's fourth in the Nora Best Mystery series is a satisfying cozy, with Nora's personal life woven throughout.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 28, 2023
Florio’s enthralling fourth whodunit featuring Nora Best (after 2022’s Best Practices) finds the amateur sleuth, who has lived out of an Airstream trailer for years, hoping that she’s found a place to settle down in a small community on a peninsula in the Pacific Northwest. She’s taken a job as a seventh-grade teacher and started a romance with Luke, a guidance counselor rotating between several schools in the area. Her insights into human nature and keen observational skills are tapped again when, during a free period, one of her students finds a corpse with a head wound near school grounds. When Nora arrives on the scene, she’s joined by another student, Damien, who recognizes the body as his father’s. Damien’s father, Ward Austin, was an environmental activist who ran a nonprofit seeking to preserve the peninsula’s wildlife, a project that led to repeated clashes with other locals, including his ex-wife’s new spouse, Spencer Templeton, a developer who’s been pushing for approval for a new hotel. It’s up to Nora to cut through small-town gossip in pursuit of firm answers. Florio never stretches credibility with Nora’s talents, making it a treat to sleuth alongside her. This series merits a long run. Agent: Richard Curtis, Richard Curtis Assoc.

August 15, 2023
A middle school teacher's end-of-term project lands her smack in the middle of murder. Nora Best is doing her darnedest to repair her life after a traumatic stint at a residential program for troubled girls. Teaching seventh grade at Peninsula Middle School in a coastal town between Seattle and Portland has its challenges, but it offers Nora a chance to get in touch with her creative side. Her frustrations include Principal Louann Everhart, who sarcastically congratulates her after the school's latest tsunami drill on shepherding almost half her class to safety. But the same drill gives Nora incentive to collaborate with colleague Sheila Connor on a joint class project sampling local citizens' reactions to a tsunami tower that local developer Spencer Templeton is building. Although the tower is a loss leader for Templeton, whose real aim is to get approval to build a luxury hotel at the sandy end of the peninsula, it's controversial enough to invite Nora's band of budding Woodwards and Bernsteins to explore a wide range of public opinion. Unfortunately, it's also controversial enough to land Nora in the middle of the investigation of the death of environmental activist Ward Austin, who opposed the project, and whose body is discovered near the shore during the drill. Florio gives a neat tutorial on how to probe a political issue from a variety of perspectives without necessarily taking sides. Although the solution to the puzzle is a little pat, watching Nora with her students is a dream. Florio continues to put a contemporary spin on the old-fashioned whodunit.

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