"Best Kept Secrets"

"Best Kept Secrets" authored by Sandra Brown is a romantic mystery.  Alexander (Alex) Gaither was raised by her grandmother.  After her mother was murdered, they moved away from where Alex's mother was raised.  Alex grows up to be a prosecuting attorney feeling unloved by her grandmother who blames Alex for her mother's death.  When her grandmother is dying, Alex asks permission to reopen the case hoping to show her grandmother who the real killer is.

Alex is convinced that the man who died in prison accused of her mother's murder is innocent and she believes one of three men did the deed --two were her mother's best friends and the other the father of one of them.  As the oil business is drying up, the father, Angus, is trying to revive the local economy by building a race track which the locals are also heavily invested in getting approved.  That doesn't make Alex very popular with anyone in town.  Angus encourages his son Junior, a womanizer, to seduce Alex and get her to stop investigating.  In the meantime the local sheriff and other friend of her mother, Reede, has designs of his own.

During her investigation a man who worked for Angus claims to have witnessed her mother's murder and can identify the killer but is killed himself before he can tell Alex who that person is.  A local minister is trying to shut down the race track and more injuries occur before Alex is able to discover the real culprit behind the murders.  If everyone hadn't been so busy protecting everyone else, maybe they would have looked for the truth at the time of her mother's killing and prevented more deaths.

I loved the mystery and the romance but could do without the romance details -- my imagination does well enough on its own, thank you!  pazt