Sometimes the best things in life happen when we least expect it. That’s what Annie Lee Fleck struggles to learn in Michelle Curry Wright’s first novel, Wait and See, Annie Lee. Annie Lee is a waitress at an upscale restaurant in the ski town of Pike, Colorado. She is happily married to a chef, Lucas, and enjoys painting the rooms of their charming house different colors. Everything seems to be going perfectly until Annie Lee finds herself calling toll-free poison control numbers and asking questions about her nonexistent daughter, Sydney. She interprets her strange new obsession as a desire to have children. Unfortunately, no matter how hard they try, she and her husband can’t seem to conceive, and Annie Lee finds herself falling into a depression. When Lucas catches her making one of her toll-free phone calls, he decides to visit his mother alone for a week and take some time away from his wife.

Annie Lee’s life is thrown into upheaval as she contemplates a life without children and now, possibly, without her beloved husband. The situation becomes even more complicated when a large diamond mysteriously makes its way into her life, she finds a picture of her husband with another woman and the entire town begins taking an interest in Annie Lee’s love life.

If it seems like a lot is going on in this novel, it’s because there is — and Wright doesn’t seem too sure how to put it all together. Wait and See becomes a confusing hodge-podge of romance, mystery, small-town antics and the ins and outs of the restaurant industry. Inordinate page time is spent on details of waiting tables, and characters are introduced for no particular reason. New plot twists materialize that don’t do much to further the core concept (if you can figure out what the core concept is) and, to top it all off, the character of Annie Lee is barely likeable and often falls into the annoying category.

On the plus side, the town of Pike comes across as charming, and some of the secondary characters have a spark that brightens up their scenes. Unfortunately, these positives cannot rise above the muddled confusion that is the rest of Wait and See, Annie Lee, leaving the reader to forget this novel soon after it’s finished.