[XFZ]≫ Read Free Black Jasmine Lei Crime Book 3 edition by Toby Neal Mystery Thriller Suspense eBooks

Black Jasmine Lei Crime Book 3 edition by Toby Neal Mystery Thriller Suspense eBooks

Download As PDF : Black Jasmine Lei Crime Book 3 edition by Toby Neal Mystery Thriller Suspense eBooks

Black Jasmine Lei Crime Book 3 edition by Toby Neal Mystery Thriller Suspense eBooks

Toby Neal is back with another action packed Hawaiian mystery adventure featuring the sexy detective Lei Texeira and her burly partner Pono Kaihale.

The book opens with Lei rappelling down a steep Oceanside cliff to get to the (crime?) scene of an automobile fall. She finds a young dead (teenage?) female still seat belted in the driver’s seat of the smashed up vehicle. Lei is eager to solve this (suicide?) mystery, so as soon as the body is taken away by the Medical Examiner, Dr. Gregory, she heads to the campground located by the Pauwela Lighthouse with her partner.

At the Pauwela Lighthouse camping grounds most of the campers tell them the same story of hearing a loud crash during the night. One resident of the campground, Ramona Haulani reported that she heard the car drive up to the cliff edge late at night so she went out of her tent to have a look. Ramona indicates that the car sat by the edge for a while then it just slowly rolled off the cliff. “It was loud” Ramona relates; she then tells of seeing a small flashlight making its way to the main road from where the car went over the cliff. Of course it was very dark with hardly any moon out, so Ramona did not see who was holding the flashlight. Lei and Pono tell Ramona to keep what she knows under wraps and to not tell anyone else what she shared with them.

Lei does not get along with her commanding officer, Lieutenant Omura, who is a petite Japanese woman with an imposing presence, a very high IQ, a black belt in Judo, and a master’s degree in criminology. Lei’s nickname for the Lieutenant is the “Steel Butterfly,” so Pono usually takes the lead in debriefings concerning their cases. As the Maui Police Department (MPD) gets closer to solving the two linked cases Lei and her partner are working, Omura shows aggressive detective skills that greatly impress and win Lei over to her leadership methods.

Someone is trying to kill Lei. During a routine morning running session with her beautiful Rottweiler Keiki, Lei is purposely run down by a vehicle. The next attempt on Lei’s life is her house being set ablaze and a sniper waiting outside to shoot anyone exiting through the windows in the back of the house. The last attempt involves someone driving a large black Cadillac Escalade into the back of Lei’s Tacoma and pushing her off the road down fifty yards into a precipice. Lei’s brushes with death are all connected with the two cases Lei and her partner Pono are investigating. The first case involves the homicide of the red-haired teenaged girl inside the car that went off the cliff by the Pauwela Lighthouse, and the other case deals with a ring of illegal cock fighting controlled by an organized crime lord with the name of House.

When Lei’s FBI friend Marcella Scott shows up, the investigation into the red-headed Jane Doe homicide case is handed over to the FBI because it points to the crime of human trafficking which is a federal crime. Marcella wants and has been encouraging Lei to join the FBI and awaits Lei’s decision till the case is solved.

Lei’s relationship with her fiancé Michael Stevens is scary for her. He wants to marry Lei and start a family, but the thought of that scares her to no end, and makes her heart beat fast in panic mode. As a young girl Lei never got over being molested by one Charlie Kwon who also molested a string of other young girls. Although Charlie did time in the Lompoc Federal Correctional Facility for this crime, he is out early on parole due to over-crowding. Lei cannot resist the urge to go and pay this monster a visit, but the encounter is not at all as she envisioned it.

Readers of the Mystery/Thriller & Suspense/Romance/Police Procedurals, and Women Sleuths genera’s will adore diving between the pages of this exciting adventure.


Tags : Black Jasmine (Lei Crime, Book 3) - Kindle edition by Toby Neal. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Black Jasmine (Lei Crime, Book 3).,ebook,Toby Neal,Black Jasmine (Lei Crime, Book 3),Toby Neal,Fiction Mystery & Detective Police Procedural,Fiction Mystery & Detective Women Sleuths

Black Jasmine Lei Crime Book 3 edition by Toby Neal Mystery Thriller Suspense eBooks Reviews

I really enjoyed this book. Lei is one tough cookie - "strong as a book and as many lives as a cat" I think is how she is described by one of her former police partners. Readers can really root for Lei because she is very human despite the harrowing circumstances. Lei wants to live and serve justice.

What I like

-there are some beautifully described scenes. The author has a nice way with words. Let's face it she's given herself the islands of Hawaii as a backdrop - easy for beautiful descriptions. But Ms. Neal has a knack for creating beauty in her writing.

-the crime(s) are smartly written to include many different types of characters. There is good balance between witnesses, police, FBI, possible suspects. The reader doesn't lose track of who these characters are because they all have a niche in the story.

-believable romance! Lei has a difficult past that she is realistically dealing with. She's careful in her relationships. Stevens is perfect for her, and the relationship slowly builds and ebbs to reflect Lei's issues. She feels true to herself.

-pacing of the book is great. There is just the right amount of fast and slow action, fun and serious moments, heart-felt and angst situations, and appropriate references to the past (also plugs to get new readers to read the previous novels).

This is the second book I have read (skipped #1). I found both book #2 and book #3 to read as stand alone books, but it would be good to go read book #1. The ending of this book nicely guides the reader into book #4. I'm invested in Lei, what happens next for her, how she continues to deal with her past, and if she will ever allow herself to be happy.
Black Jasmine is a cop story & murder mystery with several misdirections.It is listed as "Book 3", but this is one of a series of separate, stand-alone stories. There are some references to things that happened in books 1 or 2, but as it is only slight background here, you lose nothing if you start with this book, as I did. However, it has some shortcomings, too, that definitely bring down the rating.

The series is set in the Hawaiian Islands, which at least for me, is not used often as a setting. Lei Texeira is a cop who had a very bad childhood upbringing, and she is definitely NOT past all her issues, unlike many cop stories with a "broken" main character. This fact makes her both more interesting and more annoying as a character. There are times you just want to slap her and say "get over it already!". Her character development is really pretty good, considering a lot of exposition was probably done in the first two books. The author seems to bring up just enough to flesh out the character without (I hope) repeating too much from past stories. Lei is a rough and tough cop, living the job because the rest of her life scares her to death.

This story starts with a simple investigation into a likely suicide of a teenage girl. It blossoms from there, and by the end of the story she has dealt with murder, human trafficking, drugs, money laundering, dirty cops, and even having a contract put out on her life. There is a lot going on in this book, and it keeps moving. Having it set in the islands also brings in real and imagined race questions of equal treatment, and a bit on how the Hawaiians actually may feel about being pulled into the United States.

Structurally the book is well done; very few spelling errors, homonyms, tense agreement, and apostrophe trouble. That helps keep the pace moving. However, there are some issues, some small, some not so small, that do take away from the book.

There is a fairly large amount of sex in it, most of it unneeded to move the story along. While it is nowhere near the steamy scenes one finds in every JD Robb "....In Death" murder mystery, it is more than a simple hint that something happened. Of course, it shows Lei's passion in all areas of her life, but it could be dialed back a bit, especially in quantity. Next, in the several attacks on her from a hit-man, her injuries do not match the severity of the attacks. Next, though this is an investigative mystery, there is nearly no investigating that goes on. Almost every plot point that moves the story along is announced by someone as having been discovered by someone else "offstage", so to speak. Not much actually comes about visibly within the story structure. It is a mystery that largely solves itself. The book also focuses on Lei, almost to the exclusion of all else, including the actual crime story. There is a lot of angst about her upbringing and how it interferes with her relationships, but she doesn't anything about it. Her personal demons seem to be the focus of the book more than the mystery. It also leaves out almost everything about all the other police characters, to the point where they are almost cardboard cutouts.

Finally, and this is probably a pet peeve of mine alone, Lei's name really annoys me. I hate it when authors give their main character a "cutesy" name or one that is a play on words. It's like the names of the "Bond girls" in the James Bond movies, where they are really stupid. What am I talking about? Leilani Rosario Texeira, or as she is known most in the book, Lei Texeira. Get it? "Lei-Tex" (Latex, from the rubber tree). Sorry, just had to vent a little.

Overall, while the storylines were numerous and tended to get solved "off-screen" in the main, the pace was good and the concept interesting. Taking into account my issues as mentioned above, I still give this book 4 stars. I could see myself reading more of this in either direction, since this story is somewhat in the middle of the series.
Toby Neal is back with another action packed Hawaiian mystery adventure featuring the sexy detective Lei Texeira and her burly partner Pono Kaihale.

The book opens with Lei rappelling down a steep Oceanside cliff to get to the (crime?) scene of an automobile fall. She finds a young dead (teenage?) female still seat belted in the driver’s seat of the smashed up vehicle. Lei is eager to solve this (suicide?) mystery, so as soon as the body is taken away by the Medical Examiner, Dr. Gregory, she heads to the campground located by the Pauwela Lighthouse with her partner.

At the Pauwela Lighthouse camping grounds most of the campers tell them the same story of hearing a loud crash during the night. One resident of the campground, Ramona Haulani reported that she heard the car drive up to the cliff edge late at night so she went out of her tent to have a look. Ramona indicates that the car sat by the edge for a while then it just slowly rolled off the cliff. “It was loud” Ramona relates; she then tells of seeing a small flashlight making its way to the main road from where the car went over the cliff. Of course it was very dark with hardly any moon out, so Ramona did not see who was holding the flashlight. Lei and Pono tell Ramona to keep what she knows under wraps and to not tell anyone else what she shared with them.

Lei does not get along with her commanding officer, Lieutenant Omura, who is a petite Japanese woman with an imposing presence, a very high IQ, a black belt in Judo, and a master’s degree in criminology. Lei’s nickname for the Lieutenant is the “Steel Butterfly,” so Pono usually takes the lead in debriefings concerning their cases. As the Maui Police Department (MPD) gets closer to solving the two linked cases Lei and her partner are working, Omura shows aggressive detective skills that greatly impress and win Lei over to her leadership methods.

Someone is trying to kill Lei. During a routine morning running session with her beautiful Rottweiler Keiki, Lei is purposely run down by a vehicle. The next attempt on Lei’s life is her house being set ablaze and a sniper waiting outside to shoot anyone exiting through the windows in the back of the house. The last attempt involves someone driving a large black Cadillac Escalade into the back of Lei’s Tacoma and pushing her off the road down fifty yards into a precipice. Lei’s brushes with death are all connected with the two cases Lei and her partner Pono are investigating. The first case involves the homicide of the red-haired teenaged girl inside the car that went off the cliff by the Pauwela Lighthouse, and the other case deals with a ring of illegal cock fighting controlled by an organized crime lord with the name of House.

When Lei’s FBI friend Marcella Scott shows up, the investigation into the red-headed Jane Doe homicide case is handed over to the FBI because it points to the crime of human trafficking which is a federal crime. Marcella wants and has been encouraging Lei to join the FBI and awaits Lei’s decision till the case is solved.

Lei’s relationship with her fiancé Michael Stevens is scary for her. He wants to marry Lei and start a family, but the thought of that scares her to no end, and makes her heart beat fast in panic mode. As a young girl Lei never got over being molested by one Charlie Kwon who also molested a string of other young girls. Although Charlie did time in the Lompoc Federal Correctional Facility for this crime, he is out early on parole due to over-crowding. Lei cannot resist the urge to go and pay this monster a visit, but the encounter is not at all as she envisioned it.

Readers of the Mystery/Thriller & Suspense/Romance/Police Procedurals, and Women Sleuths genera’s will adore diving between the pages of this exciting adventure.