Pumped for Murder: A Dead-End Job Mystery

Viets offers a smooth blend of humor and homicide in her 10th mystery featuring dead-end job specialist Helen Hawthorne (after 2010's Half-Price Homicide). Helen and her new husband, Phil, have settled in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where they have formed a detective agency, Coronado Investigations. In their first case, Helen goes undercover as a receptionist at Fantastic Fitness to check out real estate salesman Bryan Minars, whose wife suspects he's been cheating on her with someone at the Fort Lauderdale gym. For their second case, Helen and Phil agree to help classic car restorer Gus Behr, who's convinced that his brother's shooting death 25 years earlier, written off as a suicide, was really a murder. The antics of fitness fanatics and some supercharged libidos in one case and a trip back to the drug-fueled wildness of the 1980s in the other keep Helen and Phil hopping in another satisfying outing. (May)