Rating: 4.25🌈
Stay in Your Lane! By Cari Z and L.A. Witt is a terrific suspense action packed thrill ride of a contemporary romance. Full of incredible characters, great animals sidekicks like Steve the Piranha, and hilariously crafted but vividly executed locations like the Waffles, this is a highly entertaining novel.
The characters are just amazing. Each with their own issue-based families and unique personalities. Everett Mulligan works with his family in the Mulligan Funeral Home. They are a troubled family and Everett, the youngest bears the brunt of the worst of the family’s dysfunctional relationship.
Kyle’s comes from a law enforcement family, a tradition he veered away from into a company and job as a crime scene cleaner. It’s not just the fact he’s stepping away from the family career but them as well.
They are so well defined and beautifully crafted as characters, each with distinctive qualities that endear to us and each other.
The case that brings them together is one that looks simple but becomes realistically complicated and horrifying in the implications for a larger scenario as they investigate.
It’s a very complex and well plotted case. Both emotionally and psychologically.
The families are drawn into the process too. And here is where it’s both well written and then, at the end, dropped.
While one family is brought together, the other side, the one with the most family members in upheaval, is left without resolution. Especially Everett’s dysfunctional relationship with his father.
With such a strong narrative in every other aspect of the story, I’m surprised that this element was left unexplored.
A terrific story and a definite recommendation.
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Blurb
The tasks are simple. Everett Mulligan is there to collect the body. Kyle Bowman is there to clean up the scene. Easy peasy. Get in, get out, get gone.
But Everett, for all he can be on another planet with fourteen tabs open in his brain, isn’t stupid like the cops think he is. Something about this death scene isn’t sitting right, and he’s going to figure it out. Bonus? He gets to team up with the adorkable crime-scene cleanup guy to solve the mystery.
Kyle, ever the thorough and detail-oriented cleaner, can’t ignore the scene’s irregularities either. He also can’t ignore the seriously attractive himbo from the mortuary who insists they should work together to solve what the cops insist isn’t a crime. Especially when that himbo is also enamored with Kyle’s cats and fiercely determined to make friends with his cranky piranha, Steve.
There’s a reason this death isn’t being treated as a homicide, though, and there are people who are very motivated to keep it that way.
And they’ll do whatever it takes to keep the pair of amateur sleuths from uncovering the truth.
- Publisher: GallagherWitt Publishing LLC (March 26, 2025)
- Publication date: March 26, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 290 pages
Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words 