Gusty winds…and a trail of destruction. Graduate student Raina Sun is in for a season of mayhem and murder. When she volunteered to take the new foreign exchange student shopping on the last weekend before Christmas, she ended up in a riot for the last hot toy of the season and an abandoned baby. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to be a Good Samaritan.But calling the mysterious phone number in the … number in the diaper bag leads to more questions than answers. A strange man claims to be the child’s father, and his alleged mother turns up dead. The local police are more interested in keeping the town’s good name out of international news than considering if there’s foul play. And to make matters worse, she has less than a week to find his birth parents before the FBI takes over the case.
Raina summons her sleuthing skills to protect this baby and soon discovers everyone has a few skeletons in their closets. With her pimp-cane-toting grandma, she must track down a hidden killer before she becomes the next victim. There’s no place for an amateur when it comes to murder…
Don’t miss out on Raina’s new adventure–get your copy of “Gusty Lovers and Cadavers” today!
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Very entertaining. Learned alot about the culture. Suspenseful enough I didnt want to stop reading.
Mickey
Great relationships between granddaughter and grandmother.The grandmother was a hoot!!
The Chinese American point of view is interesting.
Fine start to what looks like an entertaining cozy series.
A funny fun story. Raina seems to worry a lot about many things as she goes about finding answers to the baby left with her. Her grandma, Po Po, on the other hand is one get into the fray Two tiny Asian ladies that get the job done! Read, enjoy, and find a few chuckles along the way.
An enjoyable book with good characters. Plus, to me, a surprise ending.
This was a fun mystery with wonderful characters. Looking forward to the next one.
cozy-mystery, amateur-sleuth, women-sleuths, Chinese-customs, family-dynamics, romance, murder-investigation, humor
If you’re looking for gory stuff and erotica: look elsewhere. If you’re looking for a solid mystery with fun characters and lots of situational humor: grab your coffee, sit down, and enjoy! Raina gets put through the wringer by her family while she works to fix things for a tiny baby’s future. The mystery is foremost in the story, but since her best sleuthing partner is her Chinese grandmother, the rest just gets folded in. There are lots of suspects and people who turn out not to be what they seem. Well told, and the characters certainly are!
Great series
Cadavers….Gusty Lovers?
Gusty Lovers and Cadavers continues the formula of a successful read from Book 1, Raining Men and Corpses. The team, Raina, the protagonist and her grandmother, PoPo are still the fun-loving characters that made you laugh. Since it was the Holidays the team was down one member, Eden, who was on vacation. Raina matured and her circle of interaction was widened by the author. While at the same time creating a deeper, richer narrative that once again washed over the reader as if they were in the book. The author when building her infrastructure for the series to allow room to maneuver what, who, and how. The strategy paid off with another page turner full of various antics, emotions, family and an abundance of laughter as the main ingredient. (Note: “I received a free copy of this Book that I voluntarily chose to review.”) Gusty Lovers and Cadavers is a lighthearted page turner that I HIGHLY RECOMMEND: Gusty Lovers and Cadavers: A Chinese Cozy Mystery (A Raina Sun Mystery Book 2) -Tex.
Poor Rainy still hasn’t resolved the issue of her Grandfather’s multi-million inheritance and his second family in China.
Subbing in as a housekeeper for her friend Sonja while Sonja is on her honeymoon, Rainy discovers that the resort has a tourist section, and a second section that has wealthier pregnant foreign nationals trying to give their babies a leg up by being born in th US and getting citizenship.
She accidentally stumbles into a baby theft and subsequent murder while shopping at Target / Bullseye. A young Chinese woman hands her a baby while she goes to the restroom, then doesn’t return. A small riot over a popular toy ensues, instigated by grandmother PoPo.
Various break-ins, assaults and kidnapping scenarios follow. Along the way Raina’s good friend Brenda gets arrested, and Rainy and PoPo end up at odds. PoPo claims she can no longer trust her formerly favorite granddaughter, and throws an accusation at her of only being after grandfather’s money. The same insult hurled at her by the rest of her family. Poor Raina made him a deathbed promise to help out however she could, not realizing it meant giving his money to his other family in China, a family his wife knew nothing about.
PoPo refuses to let Raina expose the truth about the money to the rest of her family, because it is an embarrassment to PoPo.
What’s a girl to do when immersed in a culture where family is everything when family turns their back on her? She tries her clumsy best to give the baby handed to her outside the toilets back his family and connections.
Still at odds with Matthew, her ex, she finds herself fairly hauntingly alone in the end.
Sometimes duty doesn’t have very warm rewards. And an isolated new beau with few family connections is pretty cold comfort for the loss of her heart and Grandmother PoPo.
I was pleased to get an arc copy of the book, and happily volunteered my review.
This series reminds me of the push-pull of family connections, as well as the hilarious scenarios that can ensue when folks make assumptions about your ethnicity, family or connections.
It also embraces the sadness and determination Rainy has and continues to struggle with, being unmarried and a bit of an outsider.
I’m looking forward to the next steps in her journey, and hope she finds her way back to a better relationship with her feisty grandmother.
found characters ok and funny but seemed as if for teenagers and I was bored at times. Effort to finish.
A new twist on the baby snatching scheme. Favorite sentence: “Duty was heavier than a mountain.” I appreciated the guide to pronunciation at the beginning of the book.
Did not hold my interest.
Went nowhere rather slowly.
Just could not get into it. Unappealing main character and improbable plot.
Not a very well thought out book, however it does come together in the end, The initial explanation for a person that is so well qualified and the working at a resort as a maid does not make sense to me. It feels like the mystery to the “two books” have been done before and here the author lack’s originality. With foreign people having babies in your country there could be “many” other options to go with here.
The title puzzles me. No real understanding of CPS processes.
I didn’t read all of this book. The bad language in the first few pages stopped me. I want my cozy mysteries to be clean!