My eye fell on the rating for this book before I started reading. It was well below 3.5 starts. That’s very low for a cozy, particularly one that’s only available as an ARC. That was not very promising.

The plot sounded promising: Shakespeare scholar returns home after the death of her mother only to find her mother was receiving threats. With the help of her aunt and her mother’s book club the scholar starts digging for the truth. (Book club members are a curious lot.)

I don’t think I have ever been less impressed with a book. I didn’t hate it, though. It just left me feeling very mwah.

In a way I was prepared for a not very well-written book. This is surprising as the author has already penned quite a few cozy mysteries under another penname, but this story seems to have been written by someone flexing their writing muscle for the first time. At the very least it lacked a good editor. (There’s an editor receiving thanks in the acknowledgements; makes me wonder how they earned their keep.) There are inconsistencies throughout the story.

For instance, Summer remembers never having hung out at the arcade, though earlier she remembered being told off by the owner for running through the arcade. In a later chapter, Summer, Piper and Agatha leave the house together, but only Summer and Piper arrive at their destination. What happened to Agatha in the mean time is not mentioned.

Another editing issue is the misuse of names. Agatha is called Hildy several times, and the name of the island is Brigid, St. Brigid or St. Bridget. This issue gets particularly annoying when new names are mentioned, such as Loretta and Abbey, but it’s unclear who is meant. I can understand that a galley proof is not perfect, but this galley is not even fit to be submitted to a publisher, let alone to be published.

Editing issues aside, what about the story? After finding a threatening note, Summer is convinced her mother was killed. After all, a healthy woman doesn’t just die of a heart attack. (Fact is that many people don’t realise that signs for heart failure are different in women than in men. They could quite easily be mistaken for ‘feeling a little bit under the weather’.) And she suspects everyone she comes into contact with. I like characters that are a little more subtle about their suspicions. And also characters that have a stronger case for their suspicions. How can she be so sure that Hildy did not have an underlying hearth condition? Hildy was a healthy living hippie. That doesn’t sound like the kind of person that goes for an annual full-body scan.

Yet, the police have ordered an autopsy on Hildy. This bothered me throughout the book. Summer asks them for the results a few times, but the police also believe Hildy died of a heart attack (i.e. natural causes). They don’t consider her death suspicious. Then why have an autopsy done? Makes no sense. Only Summer, as next of kin, could have requested an autopsy, but it’s quite obvious she didn’t.

Summer is a hard person to like or even feel sympathy for. She seems to think she is a better person because she reads classical literature rather than anything else: “Summer had never read a commercial romance in her life. She was a classics person all the way around and had been vocal about people filling their brains with trashy books.” Now, how would she know the quality of commercial fiction if she’s never even tried it?

I have the distinct feeling the author was writing for word count rather than for plot development. The story drags on. Many scenes have the same structure. Summer is talking to someone about something insignificant then someone else (usually Piper) walks in. A rule of writing is: every scene should do something for the story. It either should establish character or further the conflict. Most of the scenes in this book did neither. Really, how many scenes are needed to show that the five women Summer talks to most are pretty much interchangeable? Perhaps some of them could have been deleted from the story altogether or merged with others. (For instance, keep Agatha, but merge Piper with Marilyn and Glads. Loose the teenager.)

After reading I believe this book’s low rating is well-deserved and should actually be even lower. This is not the quality I expect from a previously published author.

I received an ARC from NetGalley.