This is a cozy romantic mystery series so each book does contain a stand alone mystery that is solved by the end. However, I don't feel like these are as readable as standalone as other mystery series I've read. Mayfair does a good job of mentioning details from the first book, but we don't really get the usual quick and dirty recap of the previous book. Because of this, we're pretty much dropped right into the book with little context around who these individual characters are or their relationship to each other. For example, the history between Clara and her ex boyfriend is explained pretty in-depth in the first book. However, when the ex shows up in this book, we see Clara's current boyfriend being a little uneasy and Clara assures him that she only wants to be with him. So if the reader didn't read the first, they can still put together the pieces that there's some history between Clara and her ex, but we aren't given the exact details again. This might just come down to personal preference, but I really enjoy having those quick run-downs of previous plots and characters that will come into play in the current book and I think I would have settled into this book easier if we had those instead of me taking time to try and remember what happened in the first book.
This book leaned pretty hard into the romantic plot - so much so that I'd call the romance/relationship plot the main plot line. The dead guy and the fire really took a back seat to Clara and her relationships and I didn't love that choice. The first book in the series has a romantic sub-plot for sure but the murder in that book is obviously the main focus. In this second book, that is flipped and I wish the fire and the dead body were the focus of this book as well. I did like the romance elements but I just felt like for a book in a mystery series there sure wasn't much mystery being developed. In fact, a lot of the investigation aspects were done off page and then the reader is just told a summary of events after the fact. I thought the two crimes were interesting and I wish we got as much investigating in this second book as we did the first. Now, I love reading romances but this was an odd sort of situation where Clara and her boyfriend are pretty solid but she has some concerns when he leaves for his business opportunity and that brings up memories of her and Adam together. Adam has his own relationship with another woman whom he says he loves, but he's constantly thinking about Clara and how bad he messed up being with her back in the day. So it isn't exactly a love triangle, but it sort of is? There's a lot of internal monologue-ing about relationships and what each character is figuring out they want which leads to a bit of angst but no clear resolution by the end of the book.
I did really like the multi-POV elements. We're mostly in Clara's POV but we do hop into Adam's and Lucas's POVs also. I think this was a really smart idea, especially with the emphasis on the relationships in this book. There are a few times where a character's action from Clara's POV could be interpreted a number of different ways and then we would pop into that other character's POV and see the meaning behind the action. This helped lower the angst and tension in the romantic plot which kept this book firmly in the 'cozy romantic mystery' sub-genre for me. I also liked how the different characters ran in different circles in town so we could see different sides of Lemon Tree Bay just by flipping to a different character. I also found the multi-POV allowed us to see a good amount of internal character growth. These characters were doing a lot of internal reflecting and thinking and I loved that we actually got to see it from their perspectives instead of waiting for the change to be super obvious to outsiders.
Despite my previous point about the mystery being secondary to the romance, I did really like the mystery and investigation elements that we did get. Mayfair does a great job in both books at giving the reader all these different clues that seem to not go together until the very end when suddenly everything make sense. The explanation behind the crimes wasn't anything super out of this world unique, but the way the investigation was crafted was really great. I do wish Clara was more hands-on in this investigation like she was in the first book. She seemed very interested in talking out different theories with Adam and sharing the town gossip with him, but she didn't physically do much investigating. There was one particular time where she found a clue and then just handed it over to Adam (which, technically, is what she should do, but it isn't what I want my lead character in a cozy mystery to do). The investigation in the first book really dug into the town's secrets and while this one did scratch that itch a bit, I really wish we had focused more on that and less on the sort-of-love-triangle that was going on.
Overall, this was a bit of a step down for me from the first one, but I still liked it. I found this to be much more heavy on the romance and light on the investigation which isn't my personal preference. However, I still loved the characters and the town of Lemon Tree Bay so I look forward to continuing in the series.
Thanks to BookSirens for the ARC. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Expected publication date is November 26, 2021.
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