Sunset Beach

Andrews (The High Tide Club) delivers a likable, if meandering, contemporary about a down-on-her-luck athlete, her colorful lawyer father, and a decades-old missing persons mystery. After a debilitating sports injury, Drue Campbell’s employment prospects are grim, until her estranged, flamboyant father, Brice Campbell, shows up at her mother’s funeral and offers his daughter a job working in his personal injury law office with him and his new wife, Wendy (who was a high school frenemy of Drue’s). Drue learns that she has also inherited her grandparents’ run-down beach cottage in Sunset Beach, Fla. Drue’s resigned to screening slip-and-fall calls, until she becomes involved with a suspicious death at a local resort that leaves a young girl motherless. Then she stumbles on a long-unsolved missing persons case that might involve her family. The plot wanders at times and the competing mysteries end with a bit of a fizzle, but Andrews’s gift for drawing fascinating characters (including a hard-boiled female detective) and her captivating dialogue will pull most readers through to the end of this laid-back blend of cozy mystery and women’s fiction. Agent: Meghan Walker, Tandem Literary. (May)