Title: The Reluctant Coroner
Author: Paul Austin Ardoin
Date: 2018
ISBN: 978-1-949082-00-5
Quote: "Nurse practitioner...and your forensic nursing degree...The county coroner position is vacant."
Fenway is one of those people whose odd given name reflected the fact that her father really didn't care much about her. She and her mother were poor; her mother's died young. Her father was one of the richest man in fictional Dominguez County--which, in Ardoin's fictional world, contains the city of Estancia, which is the name of a town in Torrance County, California, in the real world. Why Ardoin chose to muddle the geography that way is unclear. Fictional Estancia is also the home of a distinctive cypress tree like the one on the beach of real-world Monterey...Anyway, after Fenway's mother's scanty estate is settled, her father summons her to Estancia to replace the county coroner, who has just been murdered. Fenway has just failed to be selected for a few jobs. So she becomes the reluctant coroner of Dominguez County.
The job is as bad as she feared. The Dominguez County coroner needs to be a detective and also a martial arts expert. Why does the personnel manager dislike her? Skin color, people guess (Fenway identifies as Black, like her mother). They are wrong. The personnel manager is a widow. Her husband's death had something to do with Fenway's father. So did the coroner's. So did that of a suspect whose death in the county jail could almost have been a suicide, but wasn't.
If you like a detective story with lots of police procedure and a complicated plot that'll keep you guessing, you may like The Reluctant Coroner and a good half-dozen more books in the same series. Maybe not. More sex goes on in this series than some think a detective story needs. The adulteries form the connecting threads among the murders, except when Fenway throws herself at a previously blameless married man.
Fenway is meant to be likable. The old cliche is true once again: Male authors overestimate the amount of time women spend thinking about men. Fenway is pretty and flops into bed easily, so her life's path is already strewn with ex-boyfriends. If Fenway were a character readers really want to follow through a series, she could always go back to them if she felt a need to snuggle up beside someone at night. Or she could show a little common sense and adopt a dog.
Still, no matter how trashy Fenway is, there is that big puzzle with all those pieces to fit together. Some readers will enjoy that enough to feel that the frequently violent plot twists give Fenway enough punishment.
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