Story for the Week
If I had a nickel for every time I told Corinne she is her father’s child, it would be a lot of nickels. 🤣 If you read last week’s post (Six Years Later, Still Seeing Constant Reminders of You), this marks the time of year that we think about Dennis the most. But I see him in Corinne every single day—both physically and in her personality.
Corinne started life looking soooooo much like Dennis. While we were still in the hospital, we sent newborn pictures to family and friends. Dennis’s Aunty Marleine called from London and said that she didn’t expect to see Dennis’s face staring at her when she opened the e-mail. I remember the nurses at the doctor’s office telling me that it was a good thing I carried her because she was all Dennis.
I don’t have a newborn picture of Dennis, but the pictures we have of each of them at four months old are pretty good indicators. If you look at pictures of all three of us as Corinne got older, she became a nice mix of the two of us. But when she was a baby, there was no doubting her paternity. 🤣
Dennis loved playing guitar, and his Aunty Rowena mentioned once that she wished she had made her sons keep studying guitar. Dennis immediately started looking for a guitar instructor, and right after her fifth birthday, Corinne started guitar lessons with Kevin McClain. Kevin studied music composition, so he spent a lot of time teaching Corinne how to build notes and teaching her about music, which came in handy when she started taking music theory classes as she got older.
Rodolfo plays guitar as well. Corinne hasn’t played since her dad died, which is why her guitars hang on the wall in the office, but that is a challenge for another day. Me? I can carry a tune, but I’ve never played an instrument…unless you count the hand bells at church. I can’t read music, and the only thing I needed to know for that was which notes were mine and how to count the beat. When Corinne starts talking about playing music, it’s like a foreign language to me.
In fifth grade, she started playing trombone in beginner band through the middle school. It impressed her guitar teacher, who said he never could master the muscle memory of brass instruments. She played all the way through high school and into college, and it even earned her a local music scholarship. She only stopped because it doesn’t fit in her schedule.
But the thing that gets her the “you are your father’s child” most often is her personality. Both Dennis and Corinne could be described as social butterflies. Dennis would literally talk to anyone. After meeting some of my co-workers in person once at a dinner, he became Facebook friends with several of them. He used to tag my boss at the time a countdown for the Wednesday lineup of Chicago Med, Chicago Fire, and Chicago P.D. I didn’t watch any of those shows, but he counted down with her. Another co-worker never met him in person, but she is also a social butterfly. She used to call him Den Den, and we had a group chat with the four of us called Ahyees + Ashley.
Corinne still has times she needs solo decompression time, but she has a really long social battery. She started working as a server a couple of years ago, and it’s a great job for her. It’s a lot of work, but she loves talking to people. She actively thinks of comments or jokes she can make to her customers to make friendly conversation. But she is also naturally witty…much like her father was (Witty People of the World, Teach Me Your Ways).
She recently told me a story about bringing a check out for a table, and she told them she had good news and bad news. The good news was that their bill was on the house. The bad news was that it was their house. She also receives compliments on her name pretty often. Her standard response, which typically gets a laugh, is “Thanks! I got it for my birthday.” One evening, Rodolfo and I went for dinner while she was working. I heard her introduce herself to the table behind us, and one of the customers commented that they liked her name. She used her standard response, and then added to it “and the woman behind you is the person who gave it to me.”
On the flip side of the fun similarities, Corinne also inherited Dennis’s penchant for spiraling. Dennis was always a worst-case scenario kind of person. Corinne is better at getting out of the worst-case scenario mindset, but she has to spiral first. I joke that I think of that every time I hear Noah Kahan’s Stick Season: “So I thought that if I piled somethin′ good on all my bad, That I could cancel out the darkness I inherited from dad.” She doesn’t find it very funny, but it’s so true. 🤭
At the end of the day, she’s happy about most of the ways she’s like her father…and she acknowledges that there are some not-so-great traits she got from him. In the book reviewed below, the main character thinks a lot about her dad, and at one point, her stepmother tells her, “Well. You’re your father’s child.” Apparently I’m not the only person who constantly reminds her daughter about how much she resembles her father. 🤷♀️
Book Review
⭐⭐½
2.5 Stars for Where There’s Smoke by Rachel Louise Adams
314 pages
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press | Minotaur Books
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
I received an advance copy of this title from St. Martin’s Press | Minotaur Books via NetGalley.
Publisher’s Description
A lot has happened in Dolores Hawthorne’s life since the events of last Halloween. She’s divorced, traded being a forensic pathologist for a job as a medical examiner, and now lives in small-town Wisconsin, close—but not too close—to her family.
Dolores doesn’t have much in the way of work, but that all changes when a body is found at the local slaughterhouse. Benedict Marcy owned Marcy’s Meats, and is affectionately called Mr. Mercy across the region. This high-profile case quickly catches the attention of Dolores’s friends at the FBI.
From the very beginning, this case is full of contradictions and surprises, and the team quickly learns someone is willing to go to extreme lengths to stop them from finding out the truth behind Benedict Marcy’s murder.
************
Main Characters:
- Dolores Diaz – mid-30s, just divorced, works as a medical examiner in Coldren County after giving up her career as a forensic pathologist in Los Angeles, moved away from Little Horton and changed her last name after a sexual assault 18 years before, moved back to nearby Circe after her father went missing and subsequently died the previous fall
- Eva Perez – 18 years old, works at Marcy’s slaughterhouse like her mother and her grandmother before her, she finds the dead body in the slaughterhouse, has two sisters, all three live with their grandmother since their mother died
- Sheriff Harvey Kreme – Sheriff of Coldron County
- Jonas Rettig – warden of Silvergate Prison in Coldron County
- Asher and Josie Hawthorne – Dolores’s half-siblings, Josie still lives at home with her mother
- Charlotte Hawthorne – Dolores’s stepmother, Josie and Asher’s mother
- Paul Turner – FBI agent who investigated Dolores’s father’s disappearance, based in Milwaukee
- Kate Butcher – recently graduated from Quantico and works for the FBI, Paul’s partner in Milwaukee, went to high school with Dolores in Little Horton and aways resented that Dolores was pretty and from a wealthy family
Trigger warning: past sexual assault
Let me start by saying that this book is labeled as the second in the Coldron County series. When I requested this title, however, I did not realize there would be so many references to the first book or that the main topic from the first book would be left unresolved.
When I read mystery, thriller, police procedurals, I expect references to previous cases since the story revolves around the current investigation. What I don’t expect is for the main character’s entire personality to be based on things from the previous book. I also don’t expect that context to be introduced and left unresolved just so that it can be the story in the next book. At least I assume it will be the next book. I actually have no idea.
I got the gist of the first book. Dolores found herself back in Little Horton when her father—small town mayor turned U.S. Senator—went missing. Paul and Kate, the FBI agents who investigated her father’s disappearance, recur in this story, and Paul implies that it’s because the victim could be someone important based on the fact that he’s wearing a Rolex. Paul Turner is obviously attracted to Dolores, and throughout the book, he basically teases her for turning down a job offer with the FBI several months before. The insinuation is that her work as a small-town medical examiner is beneath her. That said, there really isn’t a reason for the FBI to be in Little Horton.
I won’t give away too much about the story itself. I wouldn’t categorize it as a thriller, but it’s a decent mystery with some twists I didn’t expect. However, this book relies too much on Dolores’s past and an upcoming case that causes friction between her and Charlotte, but none of that resolves in this book. It adds absolutely nothing to this one.
Outside of the story itself, there are a lot of other things that will stop me from reading this author again. One of my biggest pet peeves is when characters in a book use expressions that don’t fit. This author grew up in France, but she’s writing about characters who grew up in the Midwest.
When Kate and Paul find themselves sharing a hotel room with two twin beds, Kate says, “If this were a movie, you’d be hot, there’d be only a double bed left, and I’d want to shag you.” Kate literally grew up in the same town as Dolores in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin. No one from Wisconsin or anywhere in the Midwest is talking about shagging.
Another time, there’s a description of “the smear of sick on her shirtsleeves.” People in the Midwest don’t use “sick” as a noun. A medical examiner would likely describe it as “vomit.” She would not use the word “sick.” There’s a description of “queueing” in a restaurant instead of lining up as well as mentioning something mailed to a “domicile” instead of a home. If you’re going to set a book in the U.S. with characters from Wisconsin, it’s important not to use phrases that no one would use.
And I don’t know if this author wanted to be a baker or bakes in her spare time or what her life has to do with baking. But a mystery that turns everything into a baking or food reference seems like it wants to be a fun, cozy mystery, and this is not that. In addition to the fact that the Sheriff’s name is Harvey Kreme and always made me think of Krispy Kreme donuts, it just sounds wrong everywhere. I couldn’t lose myself in the story at all, and it felt like it took forever to get through as a result.
- “His face was pale as vanilla ice cream.”
- “…a squat building with walls like apricot yogurt.”
- “The words weighed down her stomach like cake batter.”
- “A blond woman greeted them with a coffee-breath smile.” (Since when do smiles have a smell?)
- “The walls were the color of donut glazing.” (Donut glazing is clear.)
- “The police station in Circe looked carved from cupcake frosting. Some say your job colors the way you see the world, but for Kate, that had always been true of baking.” (This doesn’t even really make sense. It makes it sound like baking is Kate’s job.)
- “From this angle, he looked like an uninspired birthday cake.”
- “…a patch of lawn green as apple candy.”
- “They walked up a path paved with hydrangeas that could have been globs of pink meringue under the streetlights.”
- “His office smelled, incredibly, of blueberry muffins. Maybe he used special lotion. Maybe he lit scented candles in the evening.”
- “The warden arched a brow, like he wasn’t sure Kate understood what the word meant. She pictured dipping cake bites into custard, folding dough into moon crescents.”
- “Kate’s mouth felt like a cake that had been dealt too much flour.”
- “The man that walked in was the sort Kate would have placed in a bakery. She couldn’t say why. He had that air about him, a kind of softness, hands that looked carved for cake decoration.”
- “Kate planted her eyes into him like she would dig her fingers into cookie dough.”
- “The flirtation in Paul’s voice was smeared thicker than whipped cream.”
- “The words weighed like uncooked dough in her mouth.”
That’s not even close to all of the things I highlighted, and it’s only the first half of the book.
Finally, this story is set in Coldren County, Wisconsin. It is labeled “A Coldren County Novel.” At the beginning of the book, Dolores drives from the airport to Coldren County, “which everyone in the area spelled ‘Cauldron County’….” There are lots of references to Halloween. At one point, Dolores questions when someone tells her the forecast calls for snow in April. He tells her “They don’t call us Cauldron County for nothing. Some say, a witch tossed everything crossed her mind into a pot and what brewed out was us.”
Dolores grew up there. She should not be surprised at the possibility of snow in April. And she should definitely know about the local lore. But what bothered me most was the back and forth spelling of Cauldron and Coldren with no rhyme or reason. I can get behind the first reference of the way the locals spell it…maybe the second time when Dolores’s colleague talks about the witch lore. Beyond that, though, it should just be spelled Coldron, or the author should have made it the Cauldron County series.
Maybe she originally intended for this to be a cozy mystery series and changed her mind? It’s promoted as “dark not cozy.” I really don’t know, but it doesn’t work for me, and I won’t be reading this author again.
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