Romance and mystery are my favorite genres, and I’m always looking for good books that combine the two. Murder in the Hamptons looked promising. It offers a love story between reunited lovers and one of those whodunits where a group of people gather together in a big house and one of them turns up dead. In the end, the romance is decent, the mystery is lackluster, and this is a pleasant, but unremarkable, read.

Five years ago, Maggie Harding had a weekend fling with a stranger in Key West. It was something the normally sensible Maggie would never do, but after her fiance called off their wedding via voice mail, she needed to cut loose. Tyler was sexy and fun, and they shared three of the most pleasurable days of her life. At the same time, she knew he wasn’t the kind of guy she could have a future with, and at the end of the weekend she left without saying good-bye or giving him her last name and never expected to see him again.

Then Maggie’s publicist friend Lucy invites her to the Hamptons for a weekend party she is planning for a celebrity actor. Drew Fisk, a former teen heartthrob who emerged from rehab not too long ago, is celebrating the upcoming release of his comeback vehicle, a thriller called The Truth About Simon. He also recently became engaged to heiress Paige Redmond. There’s going to be a lot of society and Hollywood types at the party, and Maggie comes along to give Lucy her support. Then she discovers that one of the guests staying at the mansion is none other than Tyler Brody, her weekend fling from all those years ago. Maggie is mortified (much more so than I thought was rational) and immediately wants to go home and get away from him.

Hardly the lazy wanderer Maggie assumed he was, Tyler owns the hotel where they spent their fateful weekend. He never forgot her either, although the brittle, uptight woman before him is nothing like the carefree lover he remembers. He wants to know what happened to change her, and also why she left him all those years ago. The attraction between them is still there, and it’s not long before they’re back in bed. But their reunion is interrupted when one of the guests turns up dead on the lawn the next morning.

Early in the book, I would have predicted that the final grade would be higher than the one listed above. It gets off to a very good start. The author has a breezy writing style that’s engaging. The first few chapters are snappy and fun. The way she handles both the high society and Hollywood characters is convincing, so that this rarified world and the people in it feel believable. Readers looking for a bit of escapist fun among the rich and famous should find it enjoyable. The story moves quickly and goes down easily.

But the book gradually loses steam as it goes along. The love story is nice enough, though no different or more developed than your typical series romance. Maggie is a fairly generic heroine, the typical neurotic, uptight city girl who resists a good thing for far too long. Tyler is the more interesting character. He receives a little more development than she does and comes across as such a good guy that her insistence he isn’t right for her seems silly. This is a “waiting game” romance, where the conflict is thin and we’re basically waiting for one of the characters to realize that, despite their protests, getting together with the other person is actually the more sensible course of action. Still, the characters are both likable and their relationship has a nice, easy charm. This is a Brava release, and for the most part, the sex is as hot as promised. The romance culminates in a nicely romantic climax that’s very sweet.

The mystery is nothing special. There’s no real tension and nothing at stake for the main characters. It just seems like something they investigate to fill the time when they’re not having sex. The mystery itself isn’t intriguing enough on its own to give the reader any reason to care about the outcome and how it plays out. It unfolds in a lazy, all-too-easy way, with Maggie and Tyler not having to expend much actual effort. They conveniently overhear suspicious conversations and conveniently stumble onto clues (including one that, logically, the police should have discovered yet, conveniently, did not).

There are roughly a dozen characters/possible suspects, which is a lot. Only a few of them have distinctive enough personalities to stand out from the crowd. Everyone else kind of blends together and the author could have dropped a few characters without much notice. The whodunit aspect isn’t exactly predictable, if only because the sheer volume of available suspects keeps the possibility alive that anyone could be guilty. At the same time, the solution lacks that “Ah ha!” factor of a really good mystery, where everything comes together and the reader gets to see how the clues fall into place. The killer’s motive isn’t entirely convincing, and the author could have made any of the other characters the killer simply by changing one or two clues. Instead of “Ah ha!” my reaction was basically, “Okay, sure. Whatever.”

Murder in the Hamptons is a fairly standard C+ book. It’s an easy read and a nice enough way to spend a couple of hours, but nothing particularly memorable or out of the ordinary. If all you’re looking for is a light, breezy read for an afternoon, it may be worth a look.