Best Practices

July 25, 2022
Florio’s poignant third Nora Best mystery (after 2021’s Best Kept Secrets) finds Nora en route to Montana’s Serendipity Ranch, a therapy camp for troubled young women, where she’s taken a housemother job. On arrival, she learns that a student, Irene Bell, allegedly jumped to her death into a gorge the night before. While authorities rule it a suicide, the girls insist Irene was afraid of heights and would never have voluntarily been near a cliff. Meanwhile, Nora becomes acquainted with the ranch director, Charlie Ennis, whose strict practices, such as forcing girls who don’t finish their oatmeal to eat it for lunch and dinner, she questions. Later, on a hike with the students and Charlie, Nora accidentally stumbles into the same gorge where Irene died and discovers the body of a former housemother at the ranch. Determined to find the truth behind the deaths and expose the ranch’s misconduct, Nora springs into action. A strong female lead and a dramatic look at seldom discussed social injustices more than compensate for a familiar plot and ordinary prose. Hopefully, Nora will be back soon. Agent: Richard Curtis, Richard Curtis Assoc.

August 1, 2022
Dark doings at a rehab facility. After a self-described "summer from hell" marked by her husband's infidelity, his subsequent murder, a kidnapping, and a disquieting sojourn at her childhood home on Maryland's Eastern Shore, Nora Best is ready for a change. She hopes to find it with a job at Serendipity Ranch, a facility in remote northwestern Montana catering to what Charlie Ennis, its director, calls "troubled" teenage girls. Charlie, an affable older gentleman, somehow manages to convince Nora that the ranch's draconian behavior management system, which includes public shaming, isolation, and food deprivation, is actually therapeutic. Immediately on arrival, Nora faces a crisis: Irene Bell, one of the ranch's charges, has been found dead at the bottom of a ravine. Although it isn't clear whether her fall was an accident or suicide, what is clear is that Ennis expects Nora, a former communications expert, to handle the public face of the tragedy. Florio focuses her energy on Nora's internal struggles with her situation, giving the reader so little information about Irene that it's almost impossible to be drawn in to the puzzle of her demise. Even after a second death, Nora's painfully long effort to separate the good guys from the bad guys forces the mystery to a near standstill. Hopefully not a harbinger of a new genre: the child abuse cozy.

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