We're back with Dr Nell Ward, a few months after the events of book 1 (A Murder of Crows). A whole cast has assembled at Nell's family estate, Finchmere, to celebrate the marriage of her best friend Percy to Hawke McAnsthruther. Family tensions are high and soon Hawke's shady personal and professional life are only making those tension worse. When the wedding night ends in a death, Nell, Rav, and DI James Clarke find themselves in the middle of a murder investigation. And with Finchmere being out in the middle of the country, they must come to terms that the killer very well may be still in the house with all of them.
This is the second book in the Nell Ward series and while each book does have stand alone mysteries, I would recommend reading these in order. There are a lot of character interactions and relationship growth that I think gets lost if you do not read book 1 first. Of course, Yarwood-Lovett does her best to sprinkle in the needed information from book 1 into this read as it comes up. For me, since I read the first one a few years ago, these served as gentle reminders of some of the big plot points from that read.
The maps at the beginning of the book worried me at first because there were so many different rooms and places that I was sure I'd get confused. I was reading an eARC so flipping back and forth every few pages would have been tedious. However, I found myself not needing to look back at all and my initial study of the maps was sufficient to get a feel for the layout. Similarly, all the names on the maps of who was in which room made me worry I would have a hard time keeping so many characters straight. However, Yarwood-Lovett does a great job of introducing the characters in such a way that I had details to latch onto. Each character was unique enough that I had no issues keeping them straight, which is something I do struggle with at times. I could see a reader using that map more if they were really trying to solve the mystery before the characters did but that isn't really my style when reading mysteries.
The mystery plot was a great closed-circle mystery with plenty of rich people problems at the center. The author does a fantastic job of giving the characters believable motives as well as questionable alibis so I really had no idea who could be the killer until it was revealed. I was surprised at the number of bodies that dropped but loved how that complicated the investigation. I was expecting a bit more of a police procedural, given we have a DI in the cast. There is still a basis in ecology, but I didn't find it nearly as present in this book compared with the first (although it does come into play during clutch moments).
The pacing was spot on and it really made this story potato-chip-readable. I couldn't help but want to keep turning pages. This read never had any sort of lull or saggy middle for me as we seemed to have a constant stream of new information. This is a multi-POV read, which I think helped keep the pacing moving. So when one character reached a lull in their investigation, the POV switched and we were picking right up with a different character and their investigation. One small complaint I've had in recent mysteries I've read is that the characters spend too much time debriefing and repeating all the information they have so far - purely for the reader's supposed benefit. In this read, however, I didn't have any of those feelings. The few moments where characters got together and ran through their investigation notes were usually when they were teaming up with another character so it felt like a natural part of the story instead of feeling forced.
Overall, this was a great next installment in the series as well as a great closed-circle murder mystery. I loved being back with many of the same characters from book 1 and got some great character development through their personal relationships. I'm looking forward to reading on in the series.
Thanks to NetGalley and Embla Books for the ARC. Publication was October 18, 2022
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