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After Lana Rubicon is diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer, she moves in (temporarily) with her daughter and granddaughter, who live in a little house in a little town on the central coast of California. She has to leave behind her high-powered business life and nice things as she stays for months in her granddaughter’s bedroom and endures rounds of treatments.
Lana’s arrival in her daughter’s life is not welcome for Beth, who has carved out a perfectly content existence with her now-15-year-old, Jack. Beth left home in LA when she was pregnant at 17 and has made her own way just fine. Now she faces judgment of her life (and fashion and décor) choices every day.
Jack enjoys her time in and on the water next to their house and guiding kayaking tours when she’s not at school. She loves her grandmother and doesn’t quite understand why she and her mom don’t get along.
Then one day, a man and his son discover a dead body while on one of Jack’s kayak tours. One of the police detectives focuses on Jack, so Lana decides she’s going to find out who really did the man in. Plus, it gives her something constructive to do, at last!
The three women work together at times and not together at others, but as they get closer to the real culprit, they get closer to real danger themselves. At the same time, they get closer to each other (a little at a time).
Mother-Daughter Murder Night is a murder mystery, but it’s more a story of three generations of women getting to know each other after a long time apart. Lana and Beth are very different, and Beth has long resented her mother. But cancer and living together in small quarters shakes things up and finally allows them to talk and understand each other better.
The author notes that she wrote this book when her own mother faced a cancer diagnosis, and this was “a love letter to her mother” and “a distraction, a project that could connect us in joy instead of anxiety.” It’s easy to feel that in the pages of the book.
Rated: Moderate. Profanity includes about 10 instances of moderate profanity, about 15 uses of mild language, and about 5 instances of the name of Deity in vain. Little sexual content. Violence includes a murder and references to a fire that killed some people.
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