Road Trip by Mary Kay Andrews

 

Maeve and Therese are sisters who’ve drifted apart. Maeve is a college professor, happy to remain in her hometown of Savannah, Georgia and Therese is an actress, who isn’t exactly homeless, but drifts from job to job and man to man as she pleases.  When their mother dies, the girls inherit the estate, which includes a recently mortgaged house, a coffee can, filled with cash, and a portrait of Lady Geraldine Rossington, an English aristocrat by an old master. The painting holds great value if it can be authenticated.

As neither of the sisters are employed at present, they decide to honor their mother’s wish to trace their roots in Ireland, in hopes of authenticating the portrait.

It’s a great adventure for Maeve and Therese, and the reader.  Charming villages, beautiful scenery, irascible characters and of course, handsome Irishmen make the quest delightful and the mystery hard to put down. Road Trip will be released June 2, 2026, by St Martin’s press. Thanks to them and NetGalley for the review copy.

The Midwest Lawyer (audio) by Peter Kirkland

First in a new series featuring attorney Maggie Gallagher, a former Chicago prosecutor who has returned to her “safer” mid-west hometown of Kerry (fictional) Ohio, in order to spend more time with her family.  As a lawyer who has grown up and practiced in the Mid-west, I had to suspend a lot of disbelief for the telling of this story, including the law and the setting. While Kirkland’s story was well written, I found it to be a bit generic in setting and unreasonably simplistic in its understanding and portrayal of the law and small-town life.

Maggie happens to see emergency vehicles at a childhood friends’ home while out on a run and stops by.  There has been a shooting.  Ultimately, her friend is charged with a crime connected to it, and ballistics tests show the gun involved is one used in an unrelated, and unsolved, murder a year and a half earlier. 

Of course, her friend is charged with murder and the case speeds to trial. The rest of the book is basically narrative of the trial, and for me, it was about as accurate as any crime drama.

I listened to this book on audio and found the narrator a bit much.  She made Maggie sound like she was always the victim, and my experience with women lawyers, especially in the criminal field, is that there may be attempts to victimize them, but those attempts do not define a mindset.

Other than a couple of backyard barbecues, I found nothing that marked this book as a Midwest representative.  I think it could have stood a little more research.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, Relay Publishing for the review copy. The Midwest Lawyer was published on November 21, 2025.