I was all ready to like this book--and for the most part, I really did! It did, for the most part, exactly what I wanted it to do, and was a beautiful fluffy read that didn't mean very much but was interesting and short (you'll note I blew through it in two days, and one of those days I was on the road.) But what bumped it down from three stars to two was the ending; I just can't get behind the 'sudden twist' ending where everything about the criminal's motives are revealed at the very end, rather than the conclusion being a logical production of the investigating that the main character, even if it's not immediately clear until that moment. I don't know, maybe it's because I grew up reading Encyclopedia Brown, and so is my problem and not the book's.

Really I think the issue was: the ending came out of nowhere, and it really felt like the author realized she was running out of space to finish, when she had crammed all these details about Charleston and tea and all these other things and hadn't given more space to the actual mystery solving. And I enjoyed all those details, but with the ending, it felt like they came at the cost of the actual story. There were also so, SO many things that were not tied up at the end--all the moments, for example, when the narrative switched to be in the perspective of one of the suspects or the detective. Is the stalker going to come back in another book? What about the creepy comments of the detective? I don't know that I'm interested enough in the series (based on the way this one went) to really read further and figure it out, and I think that too is a flaw--if those were what was supposed to get me to read more, then why bother having mysteries at all?

For the most part, though, I wasn't mad at the book as a whole; I wasn't even that upset that the narrative makes a single mention of enslavement despite like 90% of the characters clearly having a family history tied up enslaving people (because they are Old Money in South Carolina.) That part I could let go, but the ending sort of ruined all of it for me.