Gangster Girl

Mitchell's earnest follow-up to Geezer Girls focuses on Daisy Sullivan, a 26-year-old lawyer, who fondly remembers her late father, a notorious London gangster, even though she's "ashamed of the terrible things he'd done." When Charlie Hopkirk, Daisy's mentor at her law firm, dies suddenly, Hopkirk's law partner asks her to go through the dead man's office and keep an eye out for anything "interesting." Daisy finds a suspiciously locked medicine cabinet that proves to be but the first of many repositories of secrets. Daisy is later stunned to run into her birth mother, 42-year-old Stella King, whom she hasn't seen since Stella abandoned her 20 years earlier. She's even more upset to learn that Stella is a vicious madam, tied to one of London's most brutal crime families. A hunky ex-con with a hidden agenda lends Daisy a hand in a gangster thriller more likely to appeal to romance fans than to those seeking gritty accounts of mean streets. (June)