cover image Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes: A Rose Gardner Mystery

Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes: A Rose Gardner Mystery

Denise Grover Swank. Crooked Lane (crookedlanebooks.com), $24.99 (288p) ISBN 978-1-62953-375-9

When DMV employee Rose Gardner, the narrator of Swank’s solid series debut, experiences a disturbing vision of her death, she composes a bucket list of items such as “dress like a princess” and sets out to accomplish them before it’s too late. A noisy fight with her mother, Agnes, and Agnes’s subsequent murder make Rose the top suspect with the police and the nosy townspeople of Henryetta, Ark., but Rose thinks that her mother was mistaken for her and fears that her sister, Violet, may be in danger. Other complications include a menacing DMV customer who keeps turning up and issuing cryptic comments, a sexy neighbor who seems to be leading a mysterious double life, a locked chest in her mother’s closet, and a dog with a flatulence problem. Despite some weak plotting, readers will root for the appealing heroine. (Aug.)