Call Down the Hawk: A Latouche County Mystery

A lively, diverse cast—mainly the members of the Hough and August families—makes up only partly for the creaky plot of Simonson’s fourth mystery set in Washington’s Latouche County (after 2013’s Beyond Confusion). Patriarch Bill Hough’s recent suicide leaves Alice, a member of the Klalo tribe, unprepared for widowhood. Bill’s daughter, Judith, an army vet, suffers from PTSD, and his alienated son, Russell, returns home after Bill’s death. When often-married Frank August, a retired banker who owns a vineyard—and who, along with his current wife, windsurfer Libby, shares a homestead with Frank’s two grown children, banker son Gus and artist daughter Jane—disappears and his body later turns up in a cherry orchard at the Hough clan’s Hawk Farm, undersheriff Rob Neill investigates. Libby’s flirtations and affairs, as well as a romance between Russell and Jane, generate some heat, but the contrived resolution of Frank’s murder will leave readers dissatisfied. (Sept.)