The Hunting Party - Lucy Foley

 

This mystery/thriller follows a group of friends on an annual New Years Eve vacation to a remote hunting lodge in Scotland.  Told from multiple points of view and with flashbacks, we learn more about the characters and how their relationships have evolved over the past 10 years since being in school together. What starts out as a leisurely vacation turns deadly when a snow storm strands the group and one person disappears and is found dead.  The snow storm blocks all means in or out of the area so the group is forced to look within to find the murder trapped among them.

I read Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None last month and absolutely loved it.  I believe that was my first closed circle mystery and after this one, I think these are becoming a new favorite flavor of mystery. I really like the immediate tension and suspicion that this type of story structure naturally brings out.  That being said, this didn't exactly work 100% for me but it was still a really fun read.  

My favorite aspect of this book was the cast of characters.  We get the perspectives of the group of friends as well as the two workers who live at the lodge full time.  The characters all alternate chapters and we get their feelings and actions in the days leading up to the death as well as reflections of their past.  I thought the characters were diverse in their feelings and relationship dynamics.  The main friend group were all upper middle class  whose problems boiled down most of the time to 'rich people problems'.  I know some people would be put off by that, but I found the interpersonal relationships to be fascinating in a sort of Mean Girls kind of way.  Our initial view of all the friends are pretty positive, but we quickly find out that they aren't as chummy as they pretend to be.  I also found the two staff members at the lodge to be really interesting - they both have pretty dark backstories that explain why they would choose a job where they are pretty much isolated from society most of the year.  I wish we would have gotten more chapters from their perspective of the friend group but the whole book takes place over the course of about 4 days so space was pretty limited.  This is one of those books where most, if not all, of the characters are unlikable which I really like.  We also don't find out who dies until well into the book so we see all these different potential motives between the different characters and we just have to go along for the ride to see how everything ends up.  This was really fun to guess along and try to decide which of the motives were potentially strong enough that someone ends up dead.

The setting in these isolated, closed circle mysteries is really key to how believable the plot ends up being.  In this case, I really enjoyed the hunting lodge as a setting.  It is super atmospheric, dark, and creepy which is the perfect contrast to what started out as a fun holiday away with friends.  We do get some scenes of the characters walking around the grounds and there is one scene where they go out hunting deer (and successfully kill one) but I think more could have been done with the landscape.  I think a lot of the tension comes from the interpersonal conflicts that arise in the group so it feels like a bit of a lost opportunity for some man vs nature tension to be in the book as well.  I do like how we get the backstory of the lodge which is dark and bloody in its own way.  I think if there were like 2 fewer characters and about 10% more interaction with the outdoors it would have been perfect.  The lodge is a really interesting mix of modern and rural.  For example, they do hunt deer for food and population control but they can also catch a train into the city to pick up more luxury items. Also, the lodge and cabins are all recently built and are furnished well.  One of the staff members thinks about how the city people come up to the lodge with their luxury outdoor wear (boots, coats, etc) but those brands don't actually hold up to real wilderness weather.  Again, I think there was a good amount of opportunity for more tension and conflict with the setting but most of the time it wasn't explored as much as I would have liked. 

The main plot is where this story fell down a few pegs for me.  As I mentioned before, I really liked finding out all the different motives that the characters may have against other characters, but once we find out who the victim is, I feel like it defeated the point of all that build up.  I think it would have been more suspenseful if we didn't find out who died until the past timeline had caught up to present day and then we go full steam ahead into the end of the book.  I also found the investigation to be pretty lacking in substance, mostly due to the time constraints of the book.  I feel like the chapters we get from when after the body is discovered are pretty low stakes until the very end climax of the story.  I would have liked more of an active investigation and more red herrings since one character is, sort of, investigating what happened.  I found the story to float in a weird middle between being a procedural and more of a character study.  The reader knows various reasons why the victim might have been killed, but the group of friends just thinks the person is missing so they aren't really turning on each other or questioning motives which would be fine but when the other characters are half investigating what happened, it made everything feel underdeveloped.  I also guessed the twists ahead of time, but only because there were just one too many hints or mentions of a particular thing.  Once or twice and my brain just thinks that's background info or world building but mention that same aspect a few more times and alarm bell start going off.  It felt a little too heavy handed right at the end like *hint hint* remember about X? *hint hint* X might be important soon *hint hint*.  Maybe readers who don't read as many thrillers wouldn't pick up on these same hints.  I don't mind guessing twists ahead of time but I do get a little annoyed when they feel too obvious in the actual story.  I want my mysteries to make me feel smart, not like I'm taking a reading comprehension test.

I wanted to briefly mention my feelings about the actual solution to the book.  This book does use the trope of mental illness in the solution and while I didn't find it to be an exploitative use of that trope, I do know some readers prefer to stay away altogether.  We also get an epilogue where we find out how the killer and some of the other characters end up a few months after the events of the book so we get a bit of closure that way.

I listened to the audio book of this while I was doing yard work and it is a full voice cast which I really like.  I really have a hard time with remembering character names and in an audio book I can't easily flip back and forth to remember who X character is.  But with the different narrators I could immediately remember who was who (even if I couldn't remember exact names).  I also found Foley's writing style to be really readable (or, I guess, listenable).  I think she does an excellent job at grounding the reader before going off with the rest of the chapter which I find an imperative skill to have for multi-POV books.  I didn't find the prose overly flowery or overly descriptive but Foley seemed to have a way of telling me the exact right amount of information for me to get a quick sketch of where the character was or what was happening at the beginning of the chapters. I also found the narrative style to be a bit different with each character as far as what types of details they would notice or how their inner monologues sounded which, again, helped me keep this whole cast of characters distinct from one another. 

Overall, a pretty fun mystery where we follow a bunch of rich jerks as they try to have a good vacation in a remote hunting lodge in the middle of winter.  Backhanded complements, judgemental looks, and angst abounds.  Wish the actual murder and subsequent murder investigation heightened the tension instead of somewhat lessening it.

What You Never Knew - Jessica Hamilton

 

 

This story follows June's return to her childhood summer home after the deaths of her mother and older sister in a short time frame.  She hasn't been back since the summer she was 12 when her mother suddenly had them leave the lake house after her father left them.  Now a forty year old divorced mom of twins, she finds out her mother never sold the house on Avril Island like she always said she had done and June goes back in search of answers.  

I found this to be a very intriguing domestic mystery that started off pretty slowly, but had a lot of good reveals that really ramped up my interest.  The lake house is on an island in Lake Champlain, Vermont.  I grew up in Vermont and could immediately connect with the whole situation of out of state people coming up to their vacation homes in the summer and the tensions that can create with the locals. June's emotional journey through this story was really the highlight for me.  She's grieving her mother and sister and goes to the lake house to try and process her grief and get some closure.  But then finding out the truth of what happened with her father and how she had been kept completely in the dark growing up piled more emotions onto June.  June returning to the lake house prompted her to examine and re-examine her memories of her summers there and now, as an adult, figuring out what was really going on with her family.  When the book moved more into the mystery investigation, it would still ground the reader in June's grief which was really interesting to see how the more she uncovered the truth, the more it caused her to confront her feelings around her mother and sister.  I thought the mystery was well crafted, intriguing, and integrated well into June's personal growth arc.

My favorite part of this book was the lake house.  It is the only house on the island and, as such, is very remote so there's an immediate sort of eerie feeling that is contrasting with June's happy memories there.  The house becomes a charter in the story as the plot develops, almost seeming to give June hints of where to look next for her answers.  Not in an explicit supernatural way or anything like that, just by the very nature of being a place with a lot of history that triggers her memories.  When June first arrives to the house, we get a very long and detailed description of the rooms and layout of the house.  When I initially read this part, I did get a little bored because there wasn't much going on besides June walking around and noticing things like the mismatched silverware in the drawer or the quilt on the bed. These were aspects that, at that moment, didn't really mean much to the reader but as we got deeper into the story, I was glad we had that long description to really be able to picture the house and any changes that were going on.  Once some spooky things start happening around the house and June learns how some of the locals feel about the house on Avril Island, it really feels like June and the house become a sort of team to protect the good times that June remembers on that island and find out the truth of what happened almost 30 years ago.

This story is told in dual POV between June and her dead sister, May.  The obvious comparison is The Lovely Bones where the dead character follows the living ones as they navigate their grief and investigation.  In this case, May dies in a car accident (that we get on page in chapter 1) so there's no mystery to her death.  She floats in and out of the story and at the beginning is more of a third party observer to give the reader some perspective.  I didn't love this choice at the beginning where I felt that the few times we got May's POV it interrupted the narrative flow of June's POV.  We didn't get much of May's POV and since it was just another window to watch June through, I didn't really get the point.  As the story progresses, May starts remembering things and we find out that she knew more about their father and the mystery behind his disappearance than she ever said while she was alive.  These revelations did make May's chapters more engaging, but since there was no way for June to talk to May, it really felt like May was just telling the reader a bit earlier than June would find out anyway.  There's also a bit of a supernatural element at play where sometimes June thinks she hears May's voice or smells her soap. But I never felt like this connection was really explored as much as I was expecting it to be. May's story did follow a very standard arc where she died, her spirit finds herself connected to June for some reason, she helps June find answers, then she is able to be free at the end. I could see what Hamilton was going for, I just didn't feel that May's character arc held the same amount of emotional tension and heaviness for me that June's did.  For me, I think the story would have had a much bigger emotional impact if we were just following June and she was finding out these secrets and working through her grief of not only the physical death of her sister but also the metaphorical death of their relationship not being what she thought it was.  I could see this mechanic working for readers who are maybe more spiritual than I am or who have maybe lost someone very close to them.  

I really enjoyed the way June interacted with the locals and how they reacted when they found out who she is.  These interactions are really fantastic, watching June interact with people who have some very strong feelings about her family and seeing her realize that the relationships she thought her family had with the town were not necessarily accurate.  Some were personally involved with her family and others were just the townspeople who were around for the aftermath of June's father's disappearance.  I do wish we would have gotten a bit more of that small town gossip mill going in this story and I was waiting for some sort of big party or something where everyone would get together and there would be some big reveals (like a fourth of July BBQ, for example).  She also mainly runs into people who were friends with her parents but I would have liked more present day interactions with other kids June knew from back then.  I think more interactions or more in depth interactions would have helped flesh out exactly how influential June's family was on the town.  Or, these additional views could give us more of an insight into how June changed from a 12 year old to now and we could get her feelings on some of the ways her life didn't turn out as planned.  We do get some of that when June runs into Ezra - the son of the groundskeeper - but I really wanted more.

The ending and reveals are what can make or break a mystery and I thought this book really stuck the landing.  I did guess the big end reveal pretty early on, but there were still a number of reveals that I didn't see coming and I thought were pulled off well. I found all the twists to have breadcrumbs that, if you picked up on them, you could have guessed the twist but the crumbs weren't super obvious so it wasn't one of those books that really holds your hand through the reveal.  I've skimmed through some other reviews and the ending seems to be a bit hit or miss where some some readers think it is asking for a bit too much of a suspension of disbelief and there were too many twists to be believable.  I didn't find any of the twists to be completely unfounded and thought, overall, that the ending was pretty believable and well developed.  I didn't love how the romance thread wrapped up but I found this story much more to be about June's personal journey than the romance so I wasn't too bothered.  I found this a very isolated story really about June and her connection with this island so I wasn't bothered by the fact that we don't get a whole lot of information about her life before or after the events on the island.  We do get a few glimpses - just enough to know that the events of the story did affect her - but we aren't diving deep into her life. 

Overall, a very satisfying slow burn mystery with some very dramatic twists in the third act.

Thanks to NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books for the ARC.

Expected publication date: April 13, 2021.

The Drowning Kind - Jennifer McMahon

 

 This story follows social worker Jax as she returns to her grandmother's estate after her sister, Lexie, is found dead - drowned in the pool in the backyard.  When she arrives at the house, she discovers Lexie had been researching their family history and the history of the property.  We also follow a second timeline starting in 1929 where Ethel and her husband visit a newly built hotel and on the hotel grounds is a natural spring rumored to grant wishes.  The two timelines intertwine as Jax and Ethel come to find that the truth behind the mysterious properties of the spring may be darker than they could ever imagine.

(TW/CW: self harm, mental illness)

My absolute favorite thing about this story was the tone.  This had an overall creepy vibe, but I never found it to be horror or even very thriller-y (although some other reviews I've read disagree with me on that point).  The main plot revolved around Jax dealing with the grief of losing her sister as well as the guilt of how distant she'd been from her family over the past few years.  The house is full of memories - good and bad - with further prod Jax's feelings on these issues.  It really felt similar to Stephen King's Pet Sematary with the overall exploration of grief that was very grounded in reality but with a strange supernatural element on the fringe that amps up the creep factor.  As the story progresses, the tone gets darker and more sinister as we find out more truths behind what, exactly, is going on with this spring.  In the past POV of Ethel, we get this same tone which enhances the idea of how this house and spring is connected through these different generations and how entwined people's lives can be. I also liked how the tone of the story contrasts with the theme of wish fulfillment which most people would think of as a really happy thing but we consistently see these characters technically get their wishes but at a great cost that they weren't expecting.  

I thought the characterization and character relationships were really well done.  We are introduced to a number of characters pretty quickly as Jax comes back into this small town for the first time in a while.  However, we quickly establish relationships as well as individual tension points between the characters which helps immediately immerse the reader into this world.  Then, the longer we stay in this small town, the more layered the connections get.  I would characterize this book as being character driven and I wasn't necessarily expecting that based on the description.  I was expecting a bit more of a supernatural thriller with a more direct threat to our protagonist.  While there was a good part of the book that revolved around figuring out the mystery that Lexie supposedly found answers to, I feel like the story kept coming back to the tension between characters.  I did enjoy the way all the characters were connected - it felt very realistic for small town nosiness. I also liked how Jax viewed her relationships through two different lenses - her emotions and her social worker side.  It was an interesting way for the reader to see how these relationships were unsettling her and how she would talk to herself to remind herself to keep calm or to drop a subject that was obviously upsetting someone.  When they were younger, Lexie was formally diagnosed with "schizoaffective disorder of the bipolar type" which would cause her to have extreme bouts of mania sometimes accompanied with hallucinations.  A big part of Jax coming back into this house and going through Lexie's research was figuring out if what she was seeing was real or if it was just her disorder as well as Jax pushing through her own personal judgements of her sister and her illness to find the truth.

My main negative point for the book was that there was one loose thread that I felt never got tied up in the end (or maybe it did and I just didn't quite understand what was going on).  This thread is was one of Jax's patients - a young boy - who started having dreams about fish who turned into monsters right before Lexie died.  He then starts having what Jax's co-worker described as a full psychotic break while Jax is away at the house. While Jax is dealing with her sister's funeral and all the other weird stuff happening, she keeps forgetting about him (and so did I, to be honest).  She would suddenly remember and then try to call his house only for it to go to voicemail. He comes back up toward the end where Jax is talking to him on the phone but then her aunt listens on the line and says no one was on the phone with her.  And that was the last we see of the boy.  I was never quite clear on if he was connected to the spring in someway or if he was having these nightmares because he was close to Jax or what, exactly, was going on.  There were other mysterious phone calls that occur throughout the story so maybe it wasn't really the boy calling and then it was just a coincidence that he had nightmares about fish monsters before Jax left?  Everything else gets tied up so nicely that I was a bit confused about the boy's thread feeling so unfinished.

Split timelines are usually a win, but this one didn't hit 100% home for me.   Overall, I think it was necessary and I really enjoyed getting to read the 'real time' events that Jax finds out about in the future.  I also think the past timeline does a good job setting the tone specifically when it comes to the spring and how the sort of lore around it began.  However, I did find myself not really caring about Ethel and her problems.  She always came across as detached from the rest of the story which tracks considering she does self harm to ground herself when her emotions get out of control.  She then would remind herself who she is, where she is, and what she's doing at that moment.  So in that way, I can appreciate her characterization but some of her chapters weren't as exciting as I think they could have been if she was a more active character.  I did like how much longer the past timeline was (decades) compared to the current day timeline (a weekish) because we got to see so much of the set up behind the house where Jax was staying in the current day.  I think being able to see the progression does make the reveals later in the book hit a little harder and makes the accusations Jax makes more believable because the reader has all this emotional backstory to back Jax up.  However, having that many years scrunched into half of the book again made things feel a little more surface level than I would have liked. 

The ending was bittersweet, but I overall thought it was the most appropriate ending there could have been.  I appreciated how we got a definite answer to if the supernatural element was read or imagined which I wasn't exactly expecting.  I would have expected a book like this where the supernatural elements were almost pushed to the side to have a more ambiguous ending in that regard.  I had to re-read the first few pages of the last chapter because I wasn't sure exactly what happened but once I caught on, I was pleasantly surprised.  It had a similar structure of an ending to a book I read last year which was the first time I'd come across that particular style of ending and I think I really enjoy that technique in these 2 books.  I found that the plot threads were tied up by the end (the above example as an exception) so the reader did get closure on a number of side plots as well as answers to the main mystery.

Overall, a very atmospheric and creepy book that explores themes of grief, guilt, and how wishes sometimes aren't better if they come true.  I'd also like to note for any fellow Vermonters (or New Englanders in general) that this book has some fantastic little gems that I think readers from other areas of the country might just skim right over.

 336 pages.

Thanks to NetGalley and Gallery Books for the ARC.

Expected Publication Date: April 6, 2021. 

The Burning Girls - C.J. Tudor

 

This story revolves around a church in a small town in England.  The book summary starts: "Five hundred years ago, eight protestant martyrs were burned at the stake here. Thirty years ago, two teenage girls disappeared without a trace. And two months ago, the vicar of the local parish killed himself." Color me instantly intrigued.  This book follows multiple characters across two different timelines but mainly focuses on Jack Brooks, the new vicar for the town of Chapel Croft, and Flo, Jack's daughter. As with many sleepy small towns, there are darker things hidden under the idyllic landscape.  

This book packs a heck of a lot into just over 300 pages and the pacing does not let up the whole time.  I was immediately pulled into the story and I could not put it down until I was finished.  There are a lot of moving parts and people to keep track of, but the overall plot I found relatively straightforward.  There were some nice, quiet moments in the book where the characters could think a bit about their situation and the events unfolding, but it wasn't long (maybe a paragraph or two) before we were back in the thick of things.  I found this to be a pretty equal split thriller/mystery/horror which I really enjoyed and all of my favorite elements to those three categories I found in this book. I think Tudor did a fantastic job of cycling through the different aspects of the story at just the right moments for me to never feel exhausted at how fast one plot line was moving.  We skipped around a whole bunch and that kept the pacing up but didn't make it feel like the story was moving unbelievably fast.  The timing for the chapter breaks were really well chosen and the best way I can describe the reading experience is that the back of my brain was chewing over the information we just learned in chapter 6 while the front of my brain was following all the new things in chapter 7.  Then, by the time I would get back to the first plot line, it felt like I had enough time to process what happened and then could continue with the story.  

What I would imagine will be the most hit-or-miss part of this book for readers is the multiple POVs and timelines.  I, however, loved the structure and couldn't imagine this story being told any other way.  We follow a total of 5 characters, but 2 of them only come up every once and a while.  Our main POVs are Jack, Flo, and an unnamed narrator - all taking place in the present day.  The other 2 POVs are the two girls that disappeared 30 years ago and we follow the weeks leading up to their disappearance. Jack's POV is told in first person and the other four are third person, which is the one aspect I found jarring only because in my flow of reading I wouldn't immediately realize that we changed POV with the new chapter.  I'm more used to the chapter headings telling us which character we're following which they didn't have in the ARC I was reading (but that may change with the finished copies, I'm not sure). I really liked how each POV had their own plot line and mystery for the reader to follow. There wasn't a single time the POV switched where I wanted to skim through just to get back to another plot line.  Every time, I was excited to find out more about X or Y now that we're back with this other character.  The plot lines do all converge with the number of reveals at the end so I found the payoff to be satisfying. Some of the reveals were hinted at (pretty strongly in my opinion) earlier on in the book but there were more subtle ones that I didn't see coming.  Even the reveals that I saw coming were still interesting because I didn't count on how that reveal would impact the other characters we're following.

I do wish we had gotten more interaction and politics of the day to day activities of being a vicar in a small town.  There's one main family in the village who is described as being very influential and donates a lot of money to the church which does come up later in the book but I would have liked to see that family using some of that power earlier for somewhat mundane things.  I think this would have helped flesh out Jack's world a bit more and set the town's hierarchy more clearly in my head. Along the same lines, I would have liked to see more community gatherings to see the towns people interact with each other as well as with Jack and Flo to get a better sense of how different Jack and Flo are as newcomers.  We get a bit of this during a pub-quiz night but I wanted maybe an extra 50 pages scattered throughout the book with these smaller sort of scenes and then I'd be very happy.

I really loved how well the historical events and town traditions were integrated into the story.  The titular burning girls are a town tradition to honor the spirits of the martyrs.  They are small figures made out of twigs that are set alight in a ceremony held every year by the village on the anniversary of the martyr deaths.  Over time, they have evolved into a ghost story of sorts where local legend says if you see the spirits of two of the martyrs then danger will befall you. The story of the martyrs gets brought up often throughout the book and at times makes characters question if ghosts are real.  It adds and extra layer to the story overall since the characters and the reader aren't sure what exactly is real or if there's a more logical explanation to what is going on. The story doesn't go full paranormal ghost-hunter but the reader is reminded of the legend just enough to keep it in mind as maybe a possibility of something else going on. This is where a lot of the more horror-leaning elements are integrated into the story and I think it is a really great way of adding an overall spooky atmosphere to the book without having to go with big scares. 

Finally, I found all the characters were really well developed and their personalities so different that I was able to remember who everyone was.  I was a bit worried going into the book that Jack, being a vicar, would have a bit of a superiority complex or be a little too perfect just because of being involved in the church.  However, we learn Jack's backstory and how faith was something learned later in life that Jack chose to pursue.  There was a line toward the beginning about how faith is something that needs to be consistently cultivated and worked on like a marriage and, as a non-religious person myself, I thought that was a really interesting view for Jack to have and be so upfront about it with both the reader as well as some of the people in the town.  There were a lot of characters in this book but I was able to keep all of them straight in my mind because their personalities were so clearly defined and shown to the reader. The personalities weren't detailed in the way that I know everyone's favorite color, but they were detailed in such a way that I know what their place in the story was and their overall connection to the town and history. Again, I would have liked to have seen some more interactions between some of the different townspeople to see how their different personalities would interact in this small town and what tensions would arise.  We did learn a few different connections and personal histories of some of the people in the story, but as a more character-focused reader, I ideally would have had a bit more.  Give me a big town meeting or something where tensions are high and there are a bunch of snide remarks and I'm a happy reader.  

Overall, this was a great, fast paced mystery/thriller/horror that kept me engaged all the way to the end.  Multi-POV and dual timelines really helped develop a rich and complex town mystery and the story had a good payoff in the end.

305 pages.

Thanks to NetGalley and Ballantine Books for the ARC.

Expected publication date is February 9, 2021.

Point Roberts - Alexander Rigby

  This story follows five characters in their investigation into who was behind 15 gruesome murders in their small town over three Februaries.  Point Roberts is located on a peninsula in Washington State and borders Canada.  For twenty seven years, the town of Point Roberts gets completely isolated for the month of February to keep them safe from the killer.  Since the lockdowns began, there have been no additional murders but the killer has never been caught.  Seventeen year old Liza moves to town to be with her new foster family and she quickly learns about the murders when she finds a book washed up on the shore titled The Fifteen. Liza joins with four other townspeople to investigate the killings and to identify the Point Roberts Slayer after 30 years.

My favorite part of this book was the way the different characters were handled.  I assumed we would be in Liza's perspective for the whole book but we actually switch between the five characters - Liza, Theodore, Colette, Grant, and Maude.  Five different points of view is a lot for a single book and when I realized how many perspectives we were getting, I was concerned the story would get confusing. However, I was pleasantly surprised that the five POV didn't detract from the story at all.  I felt Rigby masterfully balanced the different perspectives and made them all unique enough that I didn't get characters confused.  The first five chapters of the book are spent introducing the different characters and their connections to the murders.  Then, for the rest of the book, we see them team up together as they investigate.  The first chapters laid such a solid groundwork for the characters that I had a clear vision and voice for each of them.  Then, later in the book when they are all together, I didn't feel confused or out of balance.  Rigby balanced the different perspectives very well and it felt like we had five equal main characters.  I loved the different relationships that blossomed between the characters and the way the group dynamic changed depending on how many and who was involved.  

Along the same lines, I expected the narrative to get bogged down with info-dumping about the fifteen murders.  Fifteen is just a whole lot of details to go through and give the reader the information about. Rigby managed to stay away from the dreaded info-dump and instead wove the different murders into the plot.  We didn't need to know about all fifteen at once, we learned about them one at a time as the characters discussed and worked through the evidence.  This methodical process allowed the rest of the plot to move forward so the reader could stay engaged.  I also found this made the different murders more memorable and while I couldn't list off all 15 by heart, I could keep them separate in my mind so when characters brought up X or Y murder, I knew which one they were talking about.

 Where the multiple characters and multiple murders didn't work so well for me was right at the end.  The last 15% or so of the book was a big of a slog to get through because of the amount of information just being told to the reader.  We get to the end, the group figures out who the Big Bad is and then there's a long story breaking down what happened 30 years ago where we find out the reason behind each of the fifteen murders.  It was just a lot of information to take in at once and the reasons were so similar with a lot of them that it felt pretty repetitive at times.  There also wasn't much action happening during the last 15% but there was a whole lot of talking so the pacing just dragged for me.  Also, at the end, the point of view switched from third person to first person and it was super jarring for me.  I think the reason was to give more of a personal perspective on how each of these five people was feeling now that they were close to finding the truth but after reading over 300 pages in third person the sudden shift was not working for me and took me right out of the story that I was super invested in.

I thought the overall mystery was really well crafted and paced.  I was impressed with how quickly the reader is sunk into the mystery of Point Roberts and the annual lockdown procedures.  I was immediately intrigued by the set up and the cast of characters introduced.  I really liked how each of the five main characters brought something to the investigation, it wasn't one person having all the epiphanies or finding all the clues.  They felt like a real team working together while also having their own worries or goals for the outcome.  The investigation is a bit slow, but after 30 years of no new evidence or much investigation at all, it is understandable that the group would need to go back over old evidence before breaking new ground.  I found this to be a very character-driven mystery story so the plot isn't too complicated with lots of red herrings in the investigation.  A good part of the story is the characters discovering things about themselves, their relationships, or the goals in life in tandem to the main investigation.  I think some readers might be put off by that and find the actual mystery a bit simple but I found the personal growth and connections to add to the mystery investigation. I did guess most of the reveal at the end, but still found it a satisfying reveal and some of the finer details I hadn't worked out for myself. 

Overall, this was a really interesting, character-driven mystery. I loved the premise and found the pacing and narrative to be really well crafted through most of the book.  The ending dragged pretty noticeably for me, but I still enjoyed it. 

416 pages

Thanks to BookSirens for the ARC. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

 Publication date: February 1, 2021 by Alden, The Allegory Ridge Press

The Widow Catcher - Jonette Blake

 The Widow Catcher follows Delia Frost, a bank teller, as she gets wrapped up in a web of mystery and murder.  She gets invited to a book club where the other elderly members are slowly dying one by one and the host of the book club believes they are being murdered.  However, all the deaths appear to be accidental.  The host of the club wants Delia to investigate these deaths in the hopes of being able to prove there was foul play involved.  Set in a small town in Australia, most of the town knows each other which only deepens the mystery as there's a good chance the killer is someone Delia knows.

I really liked Delia as a character.  She was interesting, flawed, and not someone I would normally picture as the protagonist in a murder mystery.  She is in her early 50s and is thinking about quitting her job so she and her husband can travel around the country.  In most of the thriller/mysteries I read, if the protagonist is a woman she is normally in her mid-30s and is trying to work her way up the career ladder or make some sort of headway in her life.  Delia, however, is on the back end of that slope.  She's had a long career at the bank and has two grown children who just left the nest.  It was a really interesting perspective to read from and we know exactly how Delia feels about these changes in her life.  She loves her job at the bank, she wants her children back home, and she's growing a bit resentful of her husband.  I think she's a very interesting and flawed character and she made for a fun reading experience.  It was refreshing to have a mystery protagonist who wasn't a cop or journalist as is the case in many books.  I thought the bank teller angle was interesting and gave her particular insight into the lives of these people who were being murdered.

My biggest problem with the book was Delia's lack of agency in the last 40%.  In the first 60%, she was reluctantly getting pulled into this murder plot.  She initially thought it was just some old lady going crazy but she slowly realizes it is real.  But then she doesn't really do anything about it?  The last half of the book really felt like Delia was a direct reader stand in who just stood around as a pawn and had the plot happen to her.  I didn't feel like she was making any decisions herself, she didn't solve the case, and in the end it seemed like Delia was in pretty much the same place as when she started the book.  I wanted this nice bank teller lady to be the one to crack the case on these murders that no one else believes are murders but I didn't get the satisfying ending I was looking for.  I was also expecting Delia's parrot Monty to play a bigger role in the plot since he was so good at mimicry but that didn't happen.  The first half of the book deals a lot with Delia always putting other people before herself.  It takes her forever to tell her husband her true feelings about their current living situation because she doesn't want to upset him.  There's a lot of her going back and forth with herself weighing the options of maybe she can just grin and bear it so she doesn't have to speak up.  I was expecting her to come out of her shell a little bit though this murder investigation and stand up for herself more.  And while there was a bit of character development, it was no where near as much as I wanted or think there needed to be in the book.

I liked the overall murder mystery plot.  We get chapters from the POV of the various women who are being murdered so the reader knows right from the get-go that the murders are real but we don't know who is committing them.  And then we see other characters reading about the death in the newspaper and call it an accident.  I think the real tension in the story comes from the reader knowing the truth and waiting for Delia to figure it out.  I thought the book club angle was interesting and I wished there were more scenes from that club.  It was fun to see them all interact and Delia's somewhat judgemental attitude toward them. I thought centering the mysteries around older people dying was really interesting because one character even mentions that elderly deaths aren't looked at as closely as if someone younger had died so, in a way, it is easier to get away with murder that way.  However, I was a bit disappointed that Delia basically gets the whole explanation laid out for pretty early on in the book and then the rest of the story was her struggling if she believed it or not and thinking about getting proof one way or the other. I think if Delia had more agency in the second half of the book and actually decided to get concrete proof against the person accused of these murders, then it could have been really interesting to see her grapple with the outcome of that investigation (especially if she wanted the accusations to turn out false but they were true).  However, it felt like she just tip-toed around the whole situation and didn't want to be involved at all.

Overall, it was an interesting idea and I liked the first half, but the story really fell flat at the end and I wanted more agency from our protagonist.

260 pages

Thanks to BookSirens for the review copy. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.