Thanks to Atria for this copy.

I’m admittedly a huge fan of cozy mystery series and this is the first book that I’ve read from Jess Kidd. I’ve heard great things about her writing and her plot building so I was excited to dive into this. However, I was left feeling ‘meh’ about this. 

Cozy mysteries usually have a quirkiness to them with some eccentric characters and a memorable town. Murder at Gulls Nest follows Nora Breen, a nun who has left the order in order to find a missing former novice. Nora arrives at Gulls Nest, which is the boarding house where Frieda was last seen and quickly meets the other boarders. The synopsis described them as lively, but I found them quite boring and one dimensional. 

As the book starts, there are more deaths to be investigated and everyone thinks Nora is a busy body old woman. The boarding house and town were kind of just background instead of making them a huge player in the book and I found that the plot didn’t move very fast. 

I was hoping this would give me vibes of Thursday Murder Club or Killers of a Certain Age, but it left me wondering what to pair it with. 

It’s missing the furry side kick and memorable towns of other cozies, but missing the deeper mysteries of a regular mystery. 

Thank you to the publisher for this copy in exchange for an honest review. 


TL;DR: UGH


The subtitle of this should be “The Future of Mothers and Work” as that is the focus of this. 

This book focuses on mothers, lack of support, and burn out in the work place and that is not mentioned at all in the synopsis on the back of the book. 

As a single, childless woman in the corporate world, it’s clear I’m not the target audience for this book. Further more, the lack of mentions of women without children in workplace here is ridiculous. If you’re going to title a book “Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It’s Different Than You Think”, INCLUDE ALL WOMEN. 

Completely disregarding how women without children are also discriminated against literally undermines the synopsis of the book. 

Thanks to the publisher for the finished copy, but this one isn’t for me. 

I tried it physically and the writing wasn’t working for me so I put a hold in Libby for the audio.

 The audiobook absolutely didn’t work for me. The audio quality is poor as you can hear the narrator breathing and there are awkward pauses at page turns. 

This turned out to be much more sociological than historical and scientific then I thought it’s would be. The sociology surrounding pandemics are important, but the way the information was shared didn’t work.