This was……not good.

I thoroughly enjoyed Dial A for Aunties and recommended it to several people bc I enjoyed the fun hijinks that go along with an accidental murder and falling in love. It was fun and funny! A nice lark, with family at the center of it all.

But this….was far too over the top theatrical with the most wild and unbelievable sequence of events. It felt like the author heard the audience feedback from the first one that the outlandish aunties were everyone’s fav part, so she ramped it to up the nth degree. And I agree, the auntie antics were great in the first one. But the problem with the exponential escalation of antics is that it made the aunties turn into caricatures of themselves, and also made Meddy, the protagonist, highly scornful/critical of her aunts with much less of a thread of loving bemused acceptance; so there was no redeeming factor.

And the plot neatly resolved in the last 20 pages just like that? How.

I got this back in April near its pub date and after getting halfway through, initially was going to DNF this. But now it’s November and I’m going back through my dangling reads and decided to give this another go. I do not regret it exactly, but I didn’t have a good time either.