A KILLER RETREAT

A yoga teacher’s romantic getaway almost gets her jailed for murder.

Kate Davidson reluctantly agrees to a vacation with her boyfriend, Michael, and her German shepherd, Bella, to a health resort on an island in Puget Sound, where she’ll teach some yoga classes to pay for their stay. Kate, who has control issues and a hair-trigger temper, is enraged when a walk turns dangerous. Bella, a formerly abused dog who suffers from EPI, a life-threatening disease controlled by special food and drugs, does not play well with others, and when an overdressed woman lets her terrier, Bandit, run loose, the dog is lucky to escape a mauling. Back at the resort, Kate again meets Bandit’s owner, Monica, the stepmother of Emmy, who with her fiance, Josh, is refurbishing the resort. Kate and Michael’s accommodations are small and Spartan. Despite the beauty of the place, everything goes wrong soon after Kate’s best friend, Rene, and her husband, Sam, arrive. Rene’s sick, Sam’s upset, and Kate’s afraid that Michael will pop the question. Dinner at the vegan restaurant is spoiled by Monica’s insistence that she must have meat. She fights with both Chef Kyle, who refuses to cook flesh, and Emmy’s mother, Helen. Later, at a party, Kate rashly jokes that she’d like to poison Monica. When Monica is found strangled in the spa with her dog’s leash, Kate is first on the scene, and the lone island police officer takes her in for questioning. Michael gets her a lawyer, a down-home type who runs a goat rescue on the island but is a former defense attorney. Everyone but the lawyer and Rene begs her not to investigate; after all, she almost got killed in her maiden attempt at sleuthing (Murder Strikes a Pose, 2014).

Despite lots of red herrings, yoga lore and ways to treat EPI, Kate’s second lacks a strong mystery. And sometimes you just want to shake the temperamental heroine.