The Arizona Triangle by Sydney Graves ~ a Review

by Susan Roberts

A whodunnit about loyalty, love, and the legacy of trauma featuring a hardboiled, queer private eye whose latest case takes her deep into her own complicated past.

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site. A free book was provided for an honest review.

October 2024; Harper; 978-0063379992
audio, ebook, print (304 pages); psychological thriller

The Arizona Triangle is a debut novel and the beginning of a new detective series.  The main character is Justine (Jo) a 40ish-year-old gay woman who works for an all-female detective agency based in Tucson, Arizona.  

Jo was a tough-as-nails detective who really enjoyed her work until she's asked to go back to her hometown and try to find her childhood best friend who had vanished.  Even though Jo and Rose had a blow-up in high school and hadn't even spoken again, Rose's mother requests that Jo look into the disappearance.  Jo feels that Rose wouldn't appreciate her being involved in the case but she agrees to help. Once she gets to her hometown, she finds out that her high school boyfriend Tyler is the lead investigator for the police department.    Ironically, it was Tyler who caused the final argument between the two friends.  Jo questions Rose's brothers, her friends, and her students.  She finds out that Rose was claiming to be part Navajo and this lie had recently caused her to be fired from her teaching job.  She was a poet and spent most of her time in a local art community and as Jo got answers to questions, she learned some very unsettling things about her friend's past.  The closer she gets to the truth, the more dangerous life becomes for her.  Will she continue to try to determine what happened to Rose even though her own life is in danger?

This was an interesting well-written mystery and I didn't see the end coming.  The blurb compares this book to Sue Grafton's books.  I agree that it could have been Kinsey in a world of cell phones and computers but I thought that The Arizona Triangle was much darker than the Sue Grafton books.  Overall it was an interesting and well-written mystery and I'm looking forward to future books in the series.

Buy The Arizona Triangle at Amazon

Susan Roberts grew up in Michigan but loves the laid-back life at her home in the Piedmont area of North Carolina where she is three hours from the beach to the east and the mountains in the west.  She reads almost anything but her favorite genres are Southern Fiction and Historical Fiction.   

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