Sigh. I am really enjoying this series but this one, book 4, definitely made me dial back my enthusiasm a bit.

Nichelle is one the trail of a murderer who committed what seems to be a ritualistic killing of a homeless woman. Her contact at the police station is giving her exclusive information in return for some of the help she can provide but it’s not just her rival, Charlie, at the TV station that is challenging her for scoops. There is a blogger reporting on crime in Richmond that seems to have some type of inside track. She’s feeling like every minute is a deadline these days.

Her investigation leads to her to a televangelist’s organization and that can be a pretty tough nut to crack. She shows her usual flair for following a story and in the course of it, learns a huge amount about her family history. We get to know her mom better and Nichelle become a more fully-rounded character.

If you’ve not read the other books in the series, you can read this as a stand-alone but I think you will enjoy it more if you read the series in order.

So here are the problems.

1. There is a lot of talk about the church hiding donations from the IRS. The problem is, churches aren’t required to report their donations to the IRS. Some do, some don’t. The vast majority don’t. Income made from a bookstore or coffee shop has to be reported but donations absolutely do not. I know exactly what I’m talking about with this. This isn’t even a little bit in question. This is such a glaring issue that my enjoyment of the book was interrupted as I kept checking this on different websites to see if something had changed that I didn’t know about. It hadn’t.
3. The love triangle has taken exactly the turn we didn’t want it to. The two guys have become open rivals and it needs to stop now. This could really tank the series for me if it’s not ended really quickly.

I really love this series and these problems won’t stop me from reading more but it did dial back my enthusiasm a bit. I’ll actually be eagerly awaiting book 5 to see how this progresses.

This book was provided by Netgalley and I appreciated the opportunity to read and review it.