Sneak Peek!
Mango Confessions
Book Description:
When a beauty pageant promising tropical vibes and tiara-worthy drama rolls into my Hawaiian resort, I figure the worst thing that could happen is running out of skinny syrup. Then the director drops dead on the beach, and suddenly I’m sleuthing my way through forty sequined suspects with secrets sharper than their cheekbones.
You will LOVE this tropical cozy mystery!
Cosmopolitan Magazine calls Addison’s books, “…easy, frothy fun!”
Humor with a side of homicide. A laugh-out-loud standalone cozy mystery by New York Times, USA TODAY, and Wall Street Journal bestseller Addison Moore. Includes RECIPE!
My name is Jinx Julep, and I run a ramshackle resort in paradise where the pools are finally working, the chickens still have opinions, and apparently, pageant directors get crowned in ways the rules didn’t mention.
When the Miss Mango Beauty Pageant takes over the Coconut Cove for a week, I’m thrilled about the publicity, the photo ops, and the chance to draw a few eligible bachelors for Ruby to terrorize. But before the first sash is even tied, the pageant’s director turns up dead on the sand, and I’m suddenly investigating anyone and everyone who has anything to do with this mango madness.
Between getting trapped on a side-by-side with a suspect during a mud-soaked ranch tour, hiking the Kalalau Trail in heels I will never wear again, fending off a ranch guide who’s decided Detective Koa Hale is her one true love, and surviving the most terrifying photo shoot ever held at the blowhole, I’m starting to think the real recipe for murder is half blackmail, half tiara, and a generous sprinkle of a good old grudge.
But the pageant must go on, the malasadas are vanishing faster than my dignity, my wooden-spoon-wielding cook Lani is cooking into the void, and somewhere between the swimsuit competition and the inevitable arrest of someone for trespassing at a public landmark, I need to catch a killer who’s been smiling sweetly at me all week. Because in paradise, the most dangerous person in the room might just have the most beautiful face.
Welcome to paradise, where the crowns come with a body count, the romance is slow-burn perfection, and sometimes the sweetest face hides the sharpest knife.
Includes RECIPE!
Chapter One
“Sashes, swimsuits, and sabotage,” Halea sighs beside me with a gold clipboard in one hand and a mai tai in the other, because Halea Palani multitasks beautifully and has never once seen a reason not to. “I told you, Jinx. I was Miss Mango. I know exactly how this ends.”
“With a winner?” I ask, a touch too hopeful.
“With a body count.”
“Halea.”
“What?” She gives a not-so-innocent shrug. “I’m a former queen. I get to be ominous.”
She is, in fact, a former queen, and currently the only person on my staff to have personally survived a Miss Mango week from the inside, so I’m taking her ominous energy very seriously and have adjusted my emotional support snack inventory accordingly.
Halea is curvy in all the places curves are encouraged, with a long waterfall of brunette hair and a smile currently conducting brisk business on a cluster of pageant dads. Every last one of them has momentarily forgotten which contestant he’s related to. Halea also works at the resort I manage, and has quickly turned into one of my best staff members. Honestly, it wasn’t hard to do considering the competition.
It’s a balmy Friday evening on Kauai’s North Shore, and the sky over Coconut Cove Paradise Resort is looking rather ambitious. It’s cycling through every shade between lavender and tangerine like it can’t commit to one dramatic exit, so it has decided to stage all of them at once.
Hanalei Bay stretches out before us looking breathtaking without any apparent effort, which frankly feels like showing off at this point.
The entire North Shore has that golden late-evening glow that makes everything feel slightly more momentous than it probably is. The air is thick and heated with what I like to call the Hawaii hug, and the sand is still warm between my toes. Even the nearby plumerias are showing out tonight, perfuming the ocean breeze and turning a perfectly ordinary Friday into something that feels vaguely legendary and not at all like a homicide waiting to happen. It’s my delusion, and I’m choosing to lean into it.
What I am choosing not to lean into is the glittering hot-pink banner someone strung across the resort entrance, the one that reads Welcome, to the Miss Mango Beauty Pageant! May the Best Set of Mangoes Win! I have some serious questions about that sign. Several of them. Most of them are about the mangoes, and whether we’re still pretending we’re talking about fruit. I’m saving them all for later, along with my dignity, which I have a feeling I’ll be needing by midnight.
The Miss Mango Beauty Pageant has officially taken over my resort for the next solid week, and when I say taken over, I mean taken over completely, as in wall to wall, every corner of the property, no surface left unclaimed or unglittered.
Forty contestants, a full camera crew, a panel of judges, and a delegation of former Miss Mangoes with their tiaras already on, because apparently the crown never retires, it just goes dormant. And then there are the mothers, about whom Halea warned me extensively and at length, and for whom I was apparently still not sufficiently prepared. They descended this afternoon like a very glamorous, very opinionated invading army, and the resort has not been the same since.
“Well now, would you look at all these hot-to-trot gentlemen?” says the woman on my other side, and I turn to find Ruby Figgins already in full hunting mode, which is the only mode Ruby Figgins has ever operated in.
Ruby happens to be one of my island besties, and she’s retired and lives at the resort. She’s somewhere in her eighties, has a wild head of bright red hair, is devoted to her love of gold hoop earrings, and she moves through life like she never received the memo about slowing down and wouldn’t have read it anyway.
Her fuchsia muumuu is a visual terror. Her earrings swing like they have somewhere important to be, and her eyes are conducting a slow, deliberate sweep of the beach that has nothing whatsoever to do with beauty queens. She’s looking past them, through them, and clean around them, straight at the men now filtering in from the lobby, the bar, the beach, and various corners of the parking lot. Those men have been drawn here by some primal signal the rest of us can neither send nor receive.
“Jinx, honey, I want you to look across that beach and tell me what you see.” She snaps her fingers when she says it, and her jewelry chimes as if it too is urging me on.
“Forty beauty queens and a welcome buffet, Ruby.”
“I see prospects.” She says it with complete certainty, not a shred of self-doubt anywhere in it, and no intention of developing any tonight. It’s safe to say Ruby has a small addiction to the opposite gender.
“The contestants aren’t prospects, Ruby,” I tease.
“I’m not looking at the contestants.” She lifts a muumuu-draped arm and points at a cluster of men hovering around the glam squad that’s taken over our humble resort, every last one of them all but drooling into their mai tais. “Widower at two o’clock,” Ruby continues. “Divorcé at four. And there’s a man at six in a Hawaiian shirt that I can only describe as an emergency, in the best possible way.”
“How can you possibly tell that man is a divorcé?”
“The tan line.”
I squint. “He’s not wearing a ring.”
“Exactly,” Ruby says. “But his finger still is. Look at that stripe. The tan took twenty years, honey. The stripe took one lawyer.” She nods like we’ve just cracked the Da Vinci Code together.
“You two.” Lani materializes at my elbow with a tray of ahi poke, kalua pork sliders, and coconut shrimp appetizers, her wooden spoon already tucked into her apron. She’s clearly expecting to use it before the evening is out.
Lani Mahelona is another one of my island besties, sharp and sturdy and well into her seventies, and not a single one of those years has managed to slow her down or soften her opinions. She’s traded her chef’s whites for a bright green muumuu covered in hibiscus the size of dinner plates, and her lavender-tipped silver hair is pinned back with a fresh plumeria blossom. She looks magnificent, which she always does, and also slightly like she’s about to deliver a verdict.
“Behave,” she says. “Some of us are here to work.”
“I am working,” Ruby protests. “I’m scouting husband number fourteen. That’s a vocation.”
Lani scoffs in horror. “You’ve divorced nine of them and buried four, Ruby.”
Honestly, I’m not sure if those numbers are correct, but it’s close enough to get the multiple-matrimonial point across.
Ruby nods. “And I would like to add a fourteenth before I go myself. That’s called planning ahead.”
“Heaven help us,” Lani mutters, then pivots to me. “I’ve been thinking, Jinx.”
I lift a brow. “Should I be worried?”
“I’ve been thinking about the menu,” she continues. “It’s the Miss Mango Pageant, so I’m committing to the theme. Tell me what you think. Mango ice cream. Mango pies. Mango chutney. Mango salsa. Mango marinades. Mango cookies. Mango cakes. Mango shave ice. Mango haupia.” She pauses for breath. “And I am nowhere near finished. I am riding this fruit until it begs for mercy. Oh, and butter mochi,” she adds, eyes narrowing with intent. “Mango butter mochi bars. Chewy, golden, delicious and dangerous. I’ve already made four pans and hidden two from Spam, who has been casing the kitchen like he’s planning his third heist of the week. Because he is.”
I tick my head to the side. “That’s a lot of mango, Lani.”
Somewhere on this island, a mango tree just felt a chill run through its roots.
“The fruit started it,” she says with a shrug. “The pageant practically demands it. And I have no regrets.”
A rooster rounds the corner, stops dead in his tracks at the sight of forty beauty queens, and puffs his chest out to approximately twice its normal size, as if throwing his hat into the proverbial ring. Or his feathers, as it were. Two hens trail behind him, but he’s already lost interest in them entirely. Typical male.
Hawaiian country music drifts from the outdoor speakers, warm and lazy as the trade winds, and a small herd of cats—Coconut, Pineapple, and Mango—are conducting their usual feline surveillance from their preferred stations around the property. Each one manages to look both completely relaxed and deeply judgmental at the same time, which is a skill I respect enormously and have yet to master.
The beauty queens have fully claimed the beach now, wearing sarongs that are mostly suggestion and bikini tops that are mostly decoration. Each one walks like she’s the only woman worth looking at, and the infuriating part is she might be right.
“Sweet mother of all things slutty,” Ruby breathes. “Look at that one wearing nothing but a long gold necklace.”
I shake my head. “That’s a swimsuit, Ruby.”
“It can’t be,” Ruby protests as she squints at the woman in question.
“Can be,” Lani says with a nod. “I’ve used more fabric to dust a lamp.” She sighs hard. “Some of us are too old for parties like this.”
“And some of us,” Ruby says, eyes still fixed on the legion of ogling men, “are here for an entirely different competition.”
A smattering of former Miss Mangoes drifts by in their tiaras, because what else are you supposed to do with a tiara on a Friday night in paradise. That was rhetorical. The answer is wear it. Always. Maybe even in the shower.
I spot the contestants’ mothers clustered near the welcome table. Every one of them radiates two decades of sacrifice with an invoice attached, and every one of them fully intends to collect.
The pageant board hovers just beyond them, looking officious and slightly underpaid. And the men, well, the men are everywhere. They’re orbiting the beauty queens like men who have forgotten their names, their room numbers, and in several cases their wives.
“Now that,” Ruby says, pressing a hand to her heart, “is what I call a welcome party.”
“That,” Lani says, nodding at the crowd of men Ruby can’t stop leering at, “is what I call a cautionary tale.”
“You say that every time,” Ruby scoffs.
Lani nods. “And I’m right every time.”
“Husband number eight would disagree.”
“Husband number eight cannot disagree with anything anymore, Ruby.”
“That is an excellent point, and I choose not to dwell on it. May he rest in pieces.”
“Pieces?” I gasp.
A warm hand settles at the small of my back, and I don’t need to turn around. I already know exactly who that hand and that heady cologne belong to.
“Hey, gorgeous.” His voice is low and warm and unmistakably just for me, which means I briefly forget my own name. Embarrassing, yes, but at this point not entirely surprising. “Hello, ladies,” he says to Ruby and Lani as well.
I certainly haven’t forgotten his name, though. I turn, and there he is. Detective Koa Hale is off-duty tonight, which means he’s shown up in a dark button-down with the sleeves rolled to his forearms. No badge, no crime scene, just the man himself, and those whiskey eyes are catching the light from the tiki torches in a way that renders everything else in my line of vision temporarily irrelevant.
He smells like the ocean, clean cotton, and something warm underneath that I’ve decided is simply Koa. Possibly trademarked. Probably illegal in several states. In my immediate vicinity, approximately eleven contestants have already spotted him and adjusted their posture accordingly. We’re talking shoulders back, mangoes out.
“You made it.” I inch away just enough to appreciate his lethally handsome features.
“I said I would.”
He takes me by the hips and kisses me, slow and steady, like we have all the time in the world and also like he’s extremely aware of his audience, which he absolutely is. I’m almost certain he’s doing it on purpose. His hand stays at the small of my back for a beat longer than necessary, which is also on purpose. And boy, do I ever approve.
“Detective.”
“Resort manager.”
“You’re smoldering at me.”
“I’m just standing here.”
“You’re smoldering while standing there. Big difference.”
One corner of his mouth twitches, which is basically a standing ovation from Koa. “Take it up with the police.”
“You are the police.”
His lips curve just a notch. “Then I deny everything.”
He plants another one on me, short and sweet, and oh so very yummy, and dangerously close to making me forget we have an audience of roughly two hundred.
“Would you look at that.” Ruby fans herself with the flat of her hand and sends her gold hoops swinging. “Some of us are going to need a moment, and some of us are not getting kissed like that in this particular lifetime.”
“Ruby,” I say, biting back a laugh.
“What? I’m a witness, Jinx. And what I’ve witnessed is talent. Face it, the man knows his way around the female anatomy, starting at the lips.”
Before I can agree, a large orange furball plows into my shins, and I scoop Spam up before he can use my left leg as a launchpad to the welcome buffet, which is absolutely what he was attempting, and not for the first time this week.
Spam is a one-eared ginger tomcat, and he considers himself the true authority around here. Given his track record, I’m not entirely sure he’s wrong.
He purrs the instant he’s airborne, head-butts my chin per our established greeting protocol, and immediately begins scanning the crowd for food-heist opportunities, of which there are approximately four hundred this evening. I press a kiss to his forehead because that is how we do things, and he tolerates it because he is a professional snuggler and a professional smuggler.
“You weigh more than you did yesterday,” I’m quick to inform him.
He stares at me, utterly unbothered, which is his default setting and also his most effective communication tool. We’ve agreed to disagree about the buffet.
Lani is still listing mango derivatives under her breath when Melanie sweeps past with a tray of mocktails. Her expression makes it clear she’s being paid nowhere near enough for any of this, which is her expression every single day, so at least she’s consistent. Her chestnut hair is pulled back tight, her lipstick is a shade I can only describe as Hostile Cherry—her signature shade—and her little black dress is doing exactly what it was selected to do, which is draw attention she will absolutely refuse to acknowledge. Melanie used to be the resort manager until she wasn’t.
Have I mentioned she also goes by the Wicked Witch of the West?
Okay, so it’s more of an honorary nickname than anything official. And believe me, there are very good reasons for it.
“These women don’t eat food.” Melanie spits out the words with ire. Come to think of it, she spits out every word she’s ever spoken to me with ire. She used to run this place before the owner demoted her, promoted me, and inspired one heck of a battle of wills after that. “They run on cucumber water and pure spite.”
“I serve food,” Lani says. “That is the entire job. I’m not scrapping anything off the menu.”
Melanie narrows her eyes on the one who dared to speak up to her. “I’m not telling you what to serve, Lani. I’m telling you who you’re serving. You need to know the clientele. And I’m pretty sure the clientele exists solely on air.”
“She’s right.” Halea nods like mad. “In fact, that’s exactly why I ordered extra skinny syrups for the coffee bar. I got a case of sugar-free vanilla, sugar-free coconut, and sugar-free guilt.”
Lani’s wooden spoon comes out of her apron with speed and conviction, as if she’s been waiting for this exact moment all evening. Knowing Lani, she has. “What’s with all the sugar-free nonsense?” She wields the spoon like the threat it is. “I do not serve chemicals at this resort.”
Halea practically gags. “They aren’t chemicals, Lani. They’re alternatives.”
“That is exactly what a chemical would say,” Lani fires back.
She has a point.
Ruby leans in. “My third husband lived on cigarettes and gin. And he happened to have died extremely happy. I’m just putting that out there.”
“Ruby.” I shake my head her way for daring to drag death into the conversation. I prefer the Grim Reaper not be summoned this evening in any capacity. But let’s face it. My presence alone seems enough to do that.
“What?” Ruby manufactures an innocent blink. “I’m contributing to the nutritional conversation.”
I lift a finger to counter her point when a sound cuts me off. It’s a bark. One single, sharp, slightly indignant dog bark from somewhere in the general vicinity of the crowd.
I should note, for context, that Coconut Cove Paradise Resort does not own a dog. We are a cat establishment. A deeply, contractually committed feral feline establishment. We’ve never needed a dog policy because we’ve never had a dog, and I’d like to think the cats would have unionized at the mere suggestion. The bark isn’t alarming, exactly, but it is what I would call structurally inconsistent with the property.
Spam goes rigid in my arms. His good ear shoots straight up. The purring cuts out mid-rumble, and he sits up against my chest like a small furry soldier reporting for duty. His eyes lock on something in the crowd that I cannot, for the life of me, identify. He doesn’t blink or move. He’s officially entered what I like to call Spam Lockdown, the full-alert position he assumes approximately eleven seconds before something interesting happens at this resort, and I’ve learned over the last several months to read his signals the way people read weather patterns, which is to say imperfectly but with genuine respect for the data.
Right on cue, a conch shell booms across the resort lawn so hard the chickens scatter in four different directions.
“I will end the first one of you to step out of line this week,” a gravel-coated, three-packs-a-day, entirely mainland-flavored voice rips across the property like a foghorn with a personal grudge. “And I am talking murder!”
Spam’s good ear gives one slow, deliberate twitch.
We are absolutely getting a body this week.
He blinks once, and Koa nods my way.
For once, the three of us are in complete agreement.
***I hope you enjoyed this preview! Thank you for reading!****