Kiss the Bricks: A Kate Reilly Mystery

The supercharged spectacle of the Indianapolis 500 race provides the backdrop for Kaehler’s engaging fifth Kate Reilly mystery (after 2016’s Red Flags). Beautiful, assertive racer Kate is attracting a lot of notice during the preliminaries for the Indy, thanks to her superior skill and her loyal pit crew, but speedway old-timers recall how in 1987 rookie PJ Rodriguez was making a similar impression—until she apparently committed suicide. Now a wave of nasty innuendo about inherently unstable female race car drivers combines with PJ’s family’s attempts to get Kate involved in the decades-old case by insisting that their loved one must have been murdered. Kaehler handles the mystery well enough, but the main interest for readers is watching Kate and her entourage painstakingly comb the list of suspects while also experiencing the pre-race hoopla, which is both exhausting and thrilling. Kate herself is a charmer, and so is this book. [em]Agent: Lucienne Diver, Knight Agency. (May) [/em]