The first book, ‘A Bad Day For Sunshine’ provided me with exactly the kind of distraction and entertainment that I needed when I read it during Lockdown in 2020.
A year later, the second book, ‘A Good Day For Chardonnay’ was just as much fun. It made me laugh, it made me cry and it kept me reading because I wanted to know what happened next.
It took me a little longer to get to the final book, ‘A Hard Day For A Hangover’. I was waiting for the audiobook version to become available so that I could sink into Lorelei King’s wonderful narration but although it’s been available in the US for a while, it hasn’t shown up on Audible in the UK yet so I went with the Kindle version instead.
I had a lot of fun with this book. It had humour, action, high tension and an intriguing plot. It also had a slightly long sex scene that I skipped over but which I’m sure many people will have been looking forward to since the first book. Best of all, the book finally resolved all the questions prompted by the traumatic past shared by Sunshine, her daughter Auri and Mr Tall-Dark-and-Mostly-Silent Ravinder in a way that worked and was uplifting but wasn’t sugar-coated.
I got quite wrapped up in the plot of this one and not in an abstract ‘What could the solution to this problem be?’ way, but in ‘Oh no! I didn’t see that coming. How are they gonna survive this one?’ way.
These books have always had strong women at their heart and it was great to see those women grow stronger and work well together. I loved that three generations of Vicram woman, Sunshine, her daughter and her mother, got to show their metal.
I admire the skill with which Darynda Jones planned and delivered this trilogy. She knew exactly where she was going with this from the first page of the first book.
It’s easy to dismiss books like these, which entertain with humour and a little playfully clichéd romantic tension, wrapped around a murder or two, as light-weight and fluffy but these books go well beyond that.
Behind all the humour and crime-solving, this trilogy tells a story of a mother and daughter overcoming the trauma in their past, not through therapy but through courage and action and mutual support (and an exceptional amount of luck). I’m sure that, long after the details of the plots have faded and I’ve forgotten enough of the one-liners that they’ll make me laugh all over again the next time I read them, I’ll remember Sunshine and Auri Vicram as examples of how I’d like the people to be.
Mike Finn's Fiction 
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