Tempest in the Tea Leaves
By Kari Lee Townsend
Paperback, 294 pages, $7.99

I’ve gone to a fortune teller. Once. When I was In New Orleans for Mardi Gras. And, it was kinda fun. I can’t remember what I wanted to know, but whatever it was, I guess it wasn’t very memorable.

That’s not the case with ‘Tempest in the Tea Leaves,’ a new fortune-telling mystery by Kari Lee Townsend. Although I’m not a big believer of visions and all that kind of stuff, this book makes it very fun. And kind of explains how reading tea leaves works.

Fortune telling comes in all shapes and sizes — tea leaves, Tarot cards, crystal balls, visions … It’s a special gift and Sunshine Meadows has it.

I loved this 29-year old fortune teller, who gets her hair cut at cosmetology schools and shops for her clothes in thrift stores. I adored her new-found home, tiny Divinity, in Upstate New York. I empathized with her straight-laced, doctor and lawyer mom and dad, who wanted her to go home to the Big Apple, and embark on a real career. But Sunny is determined to do her own thing. And do it she does.

How can you not like a feisty and funny character who buys an old Victorian house, which some say is haunted, and names it Lady Victoria, a.k.a Vicky. Especially when it comes equipped with big, white attack cat, she names Morty, which appears and disappears like fog?

“He studied me with the blackest eyes I’d ever seen, and his fur was nearly glowing it was so white. He didn’t hiss, didn’t meow, didn’t purr, didn’t so much as blink. He simply stared as though he were making up his mind about me.”

Sunny’s just settled into her new home when the town librarian comes for a reading and her future is steeped in murder. Sunny does the right thing and tells the police about the killing — before it happens — then becomes the prime suspect.

Enter hunky Detective Mitch Stone. He and Sunny make the perfect couple… of polar opposites. He calls her Tinkerbell, and she calls him everything from Grumpypants to, well, you’ll have to read this page-turner to find out for yourself.

As far as new series’ go this year, this one rates right up there. I could not put it down. I’m no psychic, but I predict this series will quickly become a popular one for readers who are willing to open themselves up to the possibilities.

Lisa Allmendinger is a regional reporter for AnnArbor.com. She can be reached at lisaallmendinger@annarbor.com. In addition, each Wednesday she reviews a cozy mystery in her column called “Cozy Corner.”