The Scheme by Amethyst Drake

When Olivia Ames, the brilliant daughter of a domineering CEO, goes missing, Katherine Carson and her crack team of private eyes reluctantly join the hunt in The Scheme by Amethyst Drake, a gritty and gripping first installment of the Carson Crime Files series.

Locating an uber-rich runaway is not the typical Carson Investigations case, but the deeper they dig, the more sinister the trail becomes. Olivia had a wildly promising future in the profitable realm of bio-printing research, and appears to have caught the attention of some powerful people, leading to a tangle of motives, family members, red herrings, suspects, and side players that make this an engaging guessing game to the end.

Katherine, Lee, Sammi, and Jake are an eclectic and entertaining investigative team, and the author takes the necessary time to make each one purposeful to the story, crafting her characters with precision, especially what drives them emotionally. Their conversations and teasing riffs are believable, their errors in the case are human, and the relationship dynamics feel genuine across the plot.

There are certain expositional details and clues in the case that are offered too quickly, which sometimes undercuts the story’s sense of mystery, and the squad’s ease of access to law enforcement requires some suspension of disbelief, but that is not uncommon in the genre. All told, this tightly wound mystery feels like a true-crime podcast come to fictional life, populated with relatable sleuths and an unpredictable story, resulting in a dramatic and fast-paced private-eye thriller.