If Crime queen Melodie Campbell‘s mafia-family heroine, Gina Gallo, had a goddaughter, it might well be O'Cinneide's Candace Starr, “a
wisecracking former hit woman with a stunning array of ways to kill
people“.
In STARR SIGN,
2nd in a new crime series from Dundurn Press,
Candace finds herself in charge of a sulky stranger, the
13-year-old sister she never knew she had. Their highly erratic mother is missing. To Candace that's not unusual. What is odd is Mom's last known location: At the mansion of her estranged grandfather, a man she swore she'd never see again. The dying head of the vicious
Scarpello mob.
Now Candace will have to choose: become a reluctant foster mom to a bad-tempered tween or try to retrieve their real mom from the clutches of her not-so-loving family.
The first thing that attracted me to this novel was the wise ass narrator's unique voice - as distinctive a hard-boiled lead character as any penned by Chandler. The second was the chaotic wake-up scene. They tell beginning writers never to
start with a character waking up but there’s always an exception and
this one is a boozy doozy of a hangover scene that flaunts the full chaos of Candace's standard non-business operating procedure.
From there the pace rarely lets up. By the end of the first chapter, not only was I fully grounded in the story and its main players,I didn’t need the exquisitely timed hook to get me flipping immediately to chapter two, and then three, and then reading well into the night. The sulky sister and the hot computer nerd are fun sidekicks if not fully-fleshed characters, and the mobsters, from the lowest goon to the coldly calculating mob wife, are deftly portrayed with a minimum of extraneous detail.
This is assured prose in the hands of a masterful storyteller, taking the reader effortlessly from the mansions of the very rich to the seedy sex-trafficking brothels where gangsters go to let down their guard.
Find out more about the author and her books at
#SheKillsLit #StarrSign #Dundurn #thriller
Starr Sign
by C.S. O'Cinneide
Dundurn Press (March 2021)
ISBN 978-1-45974-487-5
