*NEW RELEASE SPECIAL* Review of NETGALLEY arc My Cousin Skinny – Book 5 of the Jersey Girl Legal Mystery series by E.J. Copperman

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed following Sandy’s adventures – see my reviews of And Justice for Mall, Inherit the Shoes and Witness for the Persecution. So when I saw this next book has Sandy reluctantly attending a family wedding – I jumped at the chance of getting a copy. And I wasn’t disappointed…

BLURB: An uncomfortable weekend awaits LA family lawyer Sandy Moss when she makes her way to her hometown in New Jersey for the wedding of her cousin Stephanie, sweetly nicknamed Skinny. Uncomfortable, because Sandy is not really looking forward to seeing her family, but at least her boyfriend, Hollywood movie star Patrick McNabb, is by her side.

However, if Sandy thought a weekend with her criticising mother and aggravating sister was bad, she definitely wasn’t prepared for the rehearsal event at the wedding venue! When Skinny enters the room, all eyes are on her and her beautiful party dress . . . covered in blood, with a knife in her hand.

Skinny says she didn’t do it. But with dozens of wedding guests witnessing her dramatic entrance, the question of who killed the corpse in the kitchen seems an easy one to answer – and an equally easy court case to lose.

REVIEW: Sandy’s relationships with her mother and perfect older sister are problematic. Sandy strongly feels her mother and sister are closer and far too judgemental of her life choices. As for her cousin, Skinny – a nickname Sandy coined when she was seven years old – they’ve never been all that close. So when Skinny hysterically insists that Sandy has to be her trial lawyer, despite Sandy now living some 3,000 miles from where said trial will be held – she is dismayed when the rest of the family join in the chorus.

I love the desert-dry observations Sandy’s first-person narration drops our way, in between what is genuinely a puzzling case fraught with difficulty. One of the major problems for Sandy comes in the shape of the Prosecutor – her ex, who admitted to her far too late that he was already married. So Sandy promptly contacted love-rat Richard’s wife and told her what had been going on, before fleeing as far away as she could get – LA. Now she has triumphantly rebuilt her life with a good job in a new law firm as a defense attorney and a loving, loyal boyfriend, who also happens to be a TV star, Patrick. So Sandy’s professional façade is sorely tested when she’s confronted with her untidy and painful past.

I tore through this thoroughly readable and entertaining legal whodunit, with a doozy of a plot twist I didn’t see coming. I reached the end with a real pang of regret, because I didn’t want the goodness to end – and this one comes highly recommended. While you obviously will get more out of these stories if you read them in order – as the crime is perpetrated and solved within this offering, you could jump in and sample this slice of Sandy’s life without undue floundering. While I obtained an arc of My Cousin Skinny from the publishers via Netgalley, the opinions I have expressed are unbiased and my own.
9/10