cover image Pistachio

Pistachio

Jeanie Doyle Singler. AuthorHouse, $20.99 trade paper (304p) ISBN 978-1-5246-8465-5

In Singler’s taut thriller, teenager Atlanta Gabriel attends her first rock concert in Spokane, Wash., in 1967. Atlanta is a cousin of the lead singer of the featured band, Pistachio. Her experience is indelibly marred when the band’s female vocalist dies offstage during the performance. The author raises the suspense by revealing next to nothing about the circumstances, apart from an unsettling passage in which men mop up blood from the floor of a ladies’ room. The band breaks up soon afterward. Flash forward 45 years. Atlanta is forced to revisit the past when she runs into two members of Pistachio in a Tacoma, Wash., bookstore, and learns that Annmarie Erving Hamilton, one of the group’s founders, has died, supposedly from accidentally mixing medications. An unexpected encounter with Annmarie’s attorney nephew, Wharton Forde, with whom Atlanta was once romantically involved, leads to the two reuniting to probe Annmarie’s death and those of several other recently deceased members of Pistachio. Singler keeps the reader guessing throughout. (BookLife)