β Scribed by Seranella, Barbara
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Miranda "Munch" Mancini has seen, done and survived just about everything in her short, hard life. Now, in Seranella's stellar seventh novel (after 2003's Unpaid Dues) about the Los Angeles mechanic, she has with luck and pluck achieved close to a normal life with her precocious and happy eight-year-old adopted daughter, Asia. But a phone call from Lisa, the "lazy, ornery, selfish" sister of Asia's late father, a one-time lover of Munch's, heralds a drastic intrusion. Lisa and her daughters, 15-year-old Charlotte and 11-year-old Jill, have left a witness protection program and want to see Asia. They bring a world of trouble with them. Soon Lisa is in jail, Charlotte is missing and Munch is coping with Jill as well as Asia while trying to track down a modern-day Fagin who will kill to protect his racket. Munch will have to call on several old friends, including ex-boyfriend and homicide cop Rico ChacΓ³n, in order to find Charlotte and protect her own. Avoiding preachiness and platitudes, Seranella expertly contrasts Munch's past life, her present one and her hopes for the future. Vivid and compelling storytelling coupled with a complex and convincing heroine should expand Seranella's readership even further.
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Starred Review Munch Mancini, the struggling heroine of this series, is so powerfully depicted, with such exquisitely telling detail, that she seems drawn directly from life. Mancini's background emerges slowly; readers will feel as if they are getting acquainted with someone they met at the store or the park. Munch is a garage mechanic and sometime limo driver in Santa Monica (this novel, the seventh installment, takes place in 1985) who often alludes to her past as a junkie, alcoholic, and street person. She now has the kind of happiness that thrills because it was entirely unexpected; you can almost hear her drawing in her breath at her luck. Munch has an adopted daughter, some other wrecked couple's cast-off but Munch's life-preserver. Her hard-won happiness is broken by a phone call from her daughter's aunt, who wants the girl to meet her cousins. One of the cousins, a Goth teen girl, goes missing soon after the meeting. Munch is drawn into finding the girl and discovers a ring of exploited and endangered children and teens. Seranella does not cheapen her mysteries by giving her main character remarkable powers of detection; Munch is an intelligent yet ordinary woman forced to use every contact and every ounce of intelligence she has to figure out what's going on so she can preserve her own life. Beautifully written and harrowing. Connie Fletcher
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