(Aug. 5, 2025) — My recommendation to beat the current heatwave is to read “Tahoe Speed,” the latest Owen McKenna mystery.

Author Todd Borg isn’t writing about speeding boats or swimmers skimming across our favorite lake. This summer, Owen McKenna is into terminal velocity speed skiing. And that takes snow – lots of it. Don’t you feel cooler already?

For those readers new to Owen McKenna, prepare yourselves for a private detective (ex-SFPD) with charm, an often-enough sense of propriety, a disbeliever in coincidences, a heart big enough to include his longtime girlfriend, Street, and her newly adopted deaf daughter, Camille, his Harlequin Great Dane, Spot, and his willingness to go above and beyond for every client.

Borg usually begins his mysteries with prologues introducing settings and victims in Lake Tahoe environs. Instead, we find ourselves in Vars, France, peering down a ski track, “so steep that it looked, from the top, like a giant, smooth, snow-covered ribbon tipped nearly vertical.”

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He introduces us to the Tahoe speed skiing team and its star, Colin Burns, who is hoping to break the 150-mph record. It is a high-risk sport. Accidents happen, as it does now – just after Burns makes history.

Not until Chapter 3, after a leisurely lunch with McKenna’s local police friends Diamond Martinez and Jack Santiago, and after rescuing an abandoned dog, does a phone call from a distressed, soon-to-be client reach McKenna. Up to now, there had been no connection between the fatally injured Tahoe skier and McKenna.

The call is from the skier’s girlfriend, Genevieve, a restaurateur near Truckee, and the beneficiary of Burn’s substantial life insurance policy, which the insurance company is denying, claiming the policy was fraudulently purchased.

Insurance is not McKenna’s forte, but Genevieve, it turns out, needs more than money. Disparate events begin to mount: petty burglaries, security threatening gangsters, the murder of the skier’s mother, an abandoned dog and his missing owner, Genevieve’s restaurant destroyed by arson, personal secrets on top of secrets, unobtainable medical records and Burns’ official autopsy. Coincidental events? And how accidental was the Tahoe skier’s death?

Read Borg’s mysteries carefully. Hardly a word is wasted.

Borg has also added a new character to the McKenna ensemble; I hope to see more of Hattie Foster of the Truckee Police Department. The author has wisely kept Camille, the deaf 9-year-old, from an earlier mystery. American Sign Language plays a critical part in “Tahoe Speed.”
While the chase scenes on icy highways may not be high speed, the ski pursuits dodging trees and unbelievable frozen pellet bullets are white knuckle events. And once again, Borg writes some of the best fight scenes.

“Tahoe Speed” is filled with twists and turns, good moves and a few not so good, trajectory science, medicine, wrestling holds, words of poetry, and even murderous love ripped from the pages of Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” It’s a cliff hanger.

Visit Sunny Solomon’s website at bookinwithsunny.com for her latest recommendations or just to ‘talk books.’

Sunny Solomon

Freelance writer at Clayton Book Club | Website

Sunny Solomon holds an MA in English/Creative Writing, San Francisco State University. She is a book reviewer for “The Clayton Pioneer” and her poetry and other writing has been published in literary journals, one chapbook, In the Company of Hope and the collection, Six Poets Sixty-six Poems. She was the happy manager of Bonanza Books, Clayton, CA and Clayton Books, Clayton, CA. She continues to moderate a thriving book club that survived the closure of the store from which it began. Sunny currently lives next to the Truckee in Reno, NV.