When She Dreams (Burning Cove, California)
Passion, danger, intrigue, and murder return to glamorous 1930s Burning Cove, California, in this sure-handed winner.
By now, Quick has perfected her formula. Take a beautiful woman with a psychic talent and a haunted past; here, Maggie Lodge, whose talent for lucid dreaming has fascinated doctors and terrified her family. Match her with a seasoned, skeptical man with a few scars of his own; here, Sam Sage, ex-L.A. cop turned private detective after a failed marriage and high-profile case. (Sage is indeed a call-out to Sam Spade, and the references to Dashiell Hammett and hard-boiled detective fiction pay off in the end.)
Put the two together to solve a mystery that quickly begins to unravel, and watch the sparks fly. Maggie hires Sam to discover who is blackmailing her boss, an advice columnist called Aunt Cornelia, by implicating her in a past death. The blackmailer wants to meet at a conference introducing the Guilfoyle Method, meant to unlock the power of the dreaming mind. Maggie suspects the Guilfoyles are cons, and she’s not happy to see the doctor who tried out his mind-opening drug on her without her consent. But when a woman is murdered at the opening reception and an imposter posing as Aunt Cornelia flees the scene, Sam and Maggie are on the case.
Passion follows the palpable attraction as these two intelligent, well-matched leads play off one another’s skills. Characters from past Burning Cove books appear but don’t take over Maggie and Sam’s story, which stays lively with new twists, more deaths, and an increasingly desperate killer who has put Maggie and Sam in their sights. With slick, precise prose, humor mixed with engaging suspense, and a truly likeable set of lovers, this is another terrific read from the always-entertaining Quick.
