On Deadly Tide is a murder mystery where the murder investigation progresses slowly. Actually, the first half of the story is mostly about Penny’s budding romance and the death of a young journalist is mainly seen as tragic. Though there are some oddities.

Things change when Jessica’s mother Louise comes to Wales to see the place where her daughter died and to take her body home. When staying at the hotel where her daughter stayed Louise takes a near fatal overdose of sleeping pills. Adamant she did not take any sleeping pills herself, this convinces Penny - and local police - there might be more to Jessica’s death after all.

The culprit is pretty obvious and I was reading on to be proven wrong. I’m actually a bit disappointed that I wasn’t.

There are a few other things I’m a bit disappointed in. For instance: Louise describes her daughter was a very ethical journalist, but then she gives an example of a story her daughter has worked on about a politician taking bribes, that doesn’t quite make Jessica shine as an ethical journalist. Apparently, Jessica rang the politician the evening before the story ran in the newspaper “to prepare him”. That makes it sound like she has not tried to speak to him before on the topic of taking bribes. It’s a good journalistic practice to try to get all sides of the story, i.e. to talk to the politician well before the story is going to run so you can add his perspective in a side bar (or mention that the politician declined to comment).

And I can't quite believe

Spoiler

that if a corpse washes up on the Irish shore they don't check the tides and call Wales to ask if they got any missing persons on their end.

The story was well-written, but I’m quite certain that if I didn’t have an ARC that is only available for a limited time (so there was some pressure to finish it), I would have probably put this book aside at some point and forgotten to ever get back to it.

I read an ARC through NetGalley.