Monday, July 30, 2012

Tempest in the Tea Leaves by Kari Lee Townsend

Title: Tempest in the Tea Leaves
Author: Kari Lee Townsend
ISBN: 978-0425242759
Publisher: Berkley/2011
Pages: 304

Sunny Meadows, 29 year old amateur sleuth  leaves her parents place in NYC for a small town called Divinity, New York. She is a psychic and wants to make a niche for herself, away from her well known parents. Her first customer is the librarian Amanda Robbins. Sunny uses tea leaves to give a reading for Amanda, which turns out to be a bad omen for Amanda, where she sees Amanda being murdered by a man. Soon after, Sunny informs the police of her reading, hoping to prevent the crime from  happening. but she is too late. Amanda is murdered within half hour of leaving Sunny's place. Detective Mitch Stone is assigned to investigate the murder. He does not believe her and accuses her as the prime suspect. (she is the only suspect). Sunny has to make use of her powers in order to find the murderer and clear her name. And discovers that Amanda had many suitors and any of them could have killed her.

Sunny is a quirky character. Half the time she does not know what she is doing. But she is determined to find out the murderer. Her way of doing detective stuff is very different. She does not hide anything from anyone and that kinda gets her in trouble.  Detective Stone and Sunny rub each other the wrong way but we do see some kind of attraction between them. Then there is this almost human cat Morty, who comes into Sunny's house from nowhere...Here we see a bit of supernatural element.

Tempest in the Tea Leaves is an enjoyable cozy mystery, with well etched characters. It is first in the Fortune Teller mystery series and I look forward to more....

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gautami - Thanks for sharing your review. It sounds as though Sunny is indeed a quirky character and they can be a lot of fun. I'm glad you enjoyed this mystery.

Peggy Ann said...

How can you not like someone named Sunny Meadows! And I love quirky!

Margaret @ BooksPlease said...

This is a new one for me. I do think it sounds so different - reading tea leaves and an almost human cat! I'll look out for it.

Peter Reynard said...

I'm so torn. As a rationalist, I can't condone psychics solving mysteries. At the same time, a good mystery is a good mystery, and fiction is fiction. :)
I'll have to keep an eye out for the author and this book. Thanks for the review.

Kimberly @ Caffeinated Reviewer said...

I love a good cozy mystery and Sunny sounds like a fun character!