Ready, Set, Scam

Williams builds her mystery on a foundation most cozy scam-plots skip entirely: the psychology of how a con man actually captures a victim. The book's real strength isn't the missing-choir-director hook itself — it's the patient, granular reconstruction of Julius's grooming of Brenda, doled out in flashback across Chapters 3 and 4. The dune dinners, the color-coordinated Sunday outfits, the slow annexation of her Monday-through-Wednesday errands, the strategic gift of Swarovski crystals instead of diamonds "one day" — these aren't romance-novel beats, they're a documented playbook of coercive control, and the author clearly understands the difference. The scene where Julius maneuvers Ronnie's spa invitation away from Brenda ("Brenda, don't you remember you have that project we're working on?") is a small, ugly, completely believable moment of isolation tactics, made worse because Brenda doesn't even register it as controlling.

Ronnie is the more conventional cozy-sleuth engine, but her interiority earns its keep too — her private, uncharitable hope that Julius is simply dead so it 'would explain his disappearance' is a sharper, darker character note than most amateur-sleuth openers allow themselves. The Bible-shelf scene, where Ronnie interrogates God directly ('Your house...and he robbed it'), gives the book unexpected emotional weight beyond the puzzle-box mechanics of the scam itself.

The pacing in these opening chapters is slack — long flashback stretches interrupt the forward momentum before the mystery machinery (Phyllis's search, the Pastor Clark investor pitch) properly engages. But the character work earns this book its award; readers who like their cozy mysteries to actually reckon with why women fall for men like Julius will find more here than genre convention requires.