Helen Hawthorne is on the run from Missouri divorce courts who want her to pay lifelong alimony to her cheating husband. She wound up in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Now she lives alongside colorful eccentrics at the Coronado Tropic Apartments. She works dead-end jobs that pay her cash off-the-books so that she can stay untraceable.

Helen now works for a bookstore chain called Page Turners, named for its founder. Unfortunately, the man’s obnoxious grandson Mr. Turner now runs the stores. In fact, he’s running them into the ground, which freaks out the staff because they seem to be selling a lot of books and doing well. Is Mr. Turner mismanaging the funds? What will they do if the Page Turners stores have to close?

Helen has no time to consider this because termites have infested the Coronado Tropic Apartments! Everyone has to evacuate so that exterminators can lock the premises and pump in poison gas. So flamboyant landlady Margery treats all her ousted tenants to three days at a beach motel.

When they return to the Coronado Tropic Apartments, they find a dead body in the bed of Peggy the parrot lady: it’s Mr. Turner from the bookstore! It turns out that Peggy used to date him back in her wild coke-snorting days. In fact, Turner even has an incriminating video he taped of one of their sex-and-coke parties. Apparently Peggy once came to the bookstore and threatened Mr. Turner if he wouldn’t give her the tape.

The cops immediately haul off Peggy as the main suspect. Soon Peggy is in prison with the district attorney seeking the death penalty! Helen must investigate to save her friend’s life. Where to start? Almost everyone has a motive to kill Mr. Turner, and the suspects include every bookstore employee whose paycheck he bounced, and every woman he ever seduced and video-taped.

This is a funny and intricate cozy-mystery. It’s obvious the author really has worked in a bookstore. Her details are dead-on accurate: the shoplifter who sneaks into the bathrooms to ditch product packaging, the customer who spills a latte and then covers it up with a pile of Harry Potter books, the kids turned loose to destroy the children’s books, and of course the person who wants you to look up a book but has no author or title information – no information at all except that the book cover is blue!

Men continue to take a beating in this series: after Helen dumps whiny boyfriend Rich, she briefly dates an even worse guy named Gabe. The author also takes aim at the poor despised underclass of print-on-demand (POD) authors. But her bookstore details are priceless as is the sequence where poor Helen takes an automated “ethics test” over the phone to land a new job she desperately needs. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry; there really are such tests and they are exactly as bad as they sound. You can find Murder Between the Covers on Amazon through this link: Murder Between the Covers: A Dead-End Job Mystery: A Dead-End Job Mystery