Hiding in Plain Sight

At the start of this muddled series launch from Ellis (the Secrets of the South series), fledgling PI Kate Weller leaves her home in Savannah, Ga., for a party on Tybee Island hosted by a client, but she has good reason to worry her troubled past is catching up with her. Sure enough, en route, Kate’s car is forced off the highway in a spray of bullets. Reluctant to cooperate with the police, Kate is glad to escape on her first official case to Charleston, S.C., in search of a liver transplant patient’s sister. Kate takes a room over a restaurant and promptly gets “tangled up with a handsome chef whose family history sounded like a Mario Puzo movie.” When the chef’s father is arrested for murder, Kate decides to handle that case, too. Her investigative technique relies on bursting into tears (thus getting policemen to share information), calling the computer whiz back at the agency to find difficult addresses, and going to lunch with the chef’s gossipy grandma. A mishmash of backstory bogs down this unwieldy mix of action and romance. Agent: Nicole Resciniti, Seymour Agency. (Aug.)