{I've Been Reading} Grand, Death, Auto

Grand, Death, Auto by Joanna Campbell Slan

When a string of suicides hits a nearby high school Kiki finds herself pulled into the investigation. Her fear is that someone may be pushing the students to take their own lives and while the regular art teacher is on maternity leave, she'll spend the last two weeks of the school year helping the students finish their portfolios and introducing them to the world of scrapbooking...while at the same time trying to get them to open up to her so that she can figure out what's really going on at the school.

Leaving her family and store puts Kiki in some difficult situations. Arranging for her employees to take over Time in a Bottle is  the easy part. Beyond that, things get a lot more difficult. Sheila, her former mother-in-law, is out of rehab and, along with her husband, wants to take the two older children on a Disney cruise.  In order to be close enough to the school, Kiki and the baby and their nanny will have to temporarily move in with her current mother-in-law.

Scrapbooking plays a huge role in this book and I loved seeing Kiki do more of it. I also liked the focus on her relationships. Those have always been my favorite things about this series and they're what keep me coming back for each new book.

Now for the stupid disclosures that bloggers are required to make... I consider the author a friend. She's sent me review copies of previous books. I bought this one directly from Amazon and she doesn't know that I'll be posting about it here. If I hadn't been so busy with the wedding and didn't know she was dealing with a hurricane, I probably would have asked her if she wanted to do a guest post here on the blog. That's a whole lot more complicated than the usual "the publisher sent me a review copy."