I had some difficulty reading this as the author seemed to be afraid of paragraphs that were more than three lines long. This caused her to start a new paragraph after a person had said two sentences, even if that person continued speaking. A rather annoying break from the traditional that a new paragraph indicates a new speaker.

I’m sure I would have enjoyed this better if I hadn’t been jarred from the story often wondering who had said something.

The main sleuth was also a bit much: she’s a wealthy and independent woman who has travelled the world and if her aunt hadn’t send her a maid she would have managed doing her own housekeeping. Somehow I can’t imagine a woman in Victorian times who grew up in wealth would do her own laundry.

I think I would have enjoyed this story more if Mikaela hadn’t mentioned at everything she did or was about to do that she experienced similar (or worse) on one of her travels. Independent and wealthy is par for the course of cozies set in Victorian England - a woman that has to work for a living obviously doesn’t have time to run around investigating things. Having toured most of the British Empire was overdoing it.

Hmm, curious how a story like this would pan out if the female sleuth was a maid.

Still, I enjoyed this book for the most part and Mikaela was quite amusing. Though I would not agree with Brodie’s assessment that she’s “intelligent beyond anyone I’ve known”. I would call her resourceful. Intelligence general prevents a person from doing stupid things.

And as always when a few sentences in a foreign language are spoken: dear editor, please have those sentences checked by someone that knows the language and its speakers beyond what comes out of Google translate.

Bit wacky at the start.

Mia Carina is rather desperately waiting for her boyfriend to propose. Despite one failed marriage under her belt she still believes in a happy ever after. That is until she spots her missing—presumed-dead husband in the crowd.

“Oh, no,” she reasons, “I can’t get married if he’s still alive.”

Well, she can’t get married either if he is only presumed dead, not any time soon anyway. Her missing husband would have to be legally dead for the marriage to end. Or Mia has to get a divorce.

But to get a divorce, she has to find her obviously rather illusive first husband. She enlist the Family to help find her husband so she can ask him for a divorce. I guess it would not be much of a story if she enlisted the family lawyer and petitioned for a divorce in absentia.

With the Family on the look out for, Mia starts planning her wedding. She has her heart set on a date five weeks away.

Uh, I’m no expert on divorce proceedings in New York, but even if the missing husband is found within an hour and immediately agrees to a divorce, I doubt it is possible to settle a divorce within that time.

At this point the story started to segue into slapstick with lots of people declaring they will kill the husband if he does not grant Mia a divorce.

Considering that her first husband is a conman and ripped off a lot of people, that leaves a plethora of suspects when he is found dead in the alley behind Mia’s house.

Not really for me. Too many over the top characters.

I read an ARC through NetGalley.

Book 3 in the series. I haven’t read the previous two and based on this one I won’t. I should probably disclose that I continued reading after the first chapter because I was curious how much stupid I would find in the book.

Jen Dawson is a mystery writer and unprepared owner of a bookstore. Though she’s been owner of the store for over a year, it seems she still hasn’t looked into the how-to’s of running a successful bookstore. She mainly spends time in her office working on her next novel (once she stopped staring at a blank sheet of paper waiting for the perfect opening line to pop into her head) and relies on her employee Lacey to run the day to day of the store.

Jen does think of a few things to make the store more money, such as charging for the coffee they serve patrons or setting up an online bookshop, anything other than actually helping customers to select the books they want to take home and read. The bookstore is struggling and it doesn’t help that a body is found in the alley next to the bookstore. It makes prospective customers reluctant to visit the store. (On the other side of the alley is the Dandy Diner, but that does not seem to suffer any lose of customers. Even though their grill cook is the prime suspect.)

For that reason, Jen insinuates herself into the murder investigation. She’s done it before and - she contemplates often - that only just about not cost her her life. Not that that stops her this time. It’s not just the store she wants to save. Jen also thinks the police have their eye on the wrong man. She thinks her friend Marcus would not do anything that could jeopardise his life with his daughters. Never mind that the murder victim was threatening that very life.

She says she’s investigating for Marcus and his daughters. I think the real reason she’s being nosey is to one-up detective Havermayer.

Okay, in a way I’m all up for that. The police make an arrest because the “circumstantial evidence is overwhelming”. I, on the other hand, am seriously underwhelmed by the circumstantial evidence. The evidence gives a pretty good argument why Marcus would want Travis out of his life, but that’s not the same as to want him dead. Do they have a murder weapon? No. Do they have any proof Marcus has the necessary anatomic knowledge. No.

Does Jen ask these questions? Again, no. Jen works on the premise that the police have it wrong because Marcus is her friend and therefore above suspicion.

The mystery isn’t well-plotted. The author drops some pretty obvious clues, that because of their oddity in normal people’s conversation just scream out “I’m a clue, look at me.” One riddle isn’t solved, but rather pops-up at the end:

Spoiler

Why didn’t the murderer dump the body of the victim in the tunnels? The body would have never been found.

A final word on Eric the boyfriend. He’s a passive-aggressive jerk with a well-I-guess-you-don’t-love-me-as-much-as-I-love-you attitude. Jen’s never going to be good enough for this guy. So please, author, give your girl some backbone and dump the guy like the turd that he is.

I was enjoying the story for the first third, but it did take a long time to get to the actual murder. I started to think that perhaps this was going to be a mystery about who caused all the bad things to happen to Whitney’s house.

Soon after, murder happens and corpse is found. Whitney is made to identify the body. Well, made … she’s manipulated into identifying the body. “Otherwise we’ll have to call a family member. You don’t want one of his loved ones to have to go through that, do you?” the lead detective says.

I think Whitney should have protested a little harder that she doesn’t want to do it. On the one hand, Whitney is portrayed as a touch cookie, doing evictions on her own without backup (in a state where gun ownership is not an oddity) and yet, she’s pretty spineless when it comes to standing up for herself in other situations.

That evening Colette, Whitney’s friend, takes her out for drinks and after Whitney tells her about everything that has happened to her in the past week, the two of them compile a list of possible suspects.

And though I can agree to most of the people on the list, I can’t agree with Presley, the dead man’s assistant, at least not for the reason Colette and Whitney think of. So, sure he probably was an awful boss that undervalued and underpaid her and didn’t support her ambition to have a career in his company. But that’s no reason to kill the guy. That’s reason to quit and find opportunities elsewhere.

Perhaps I’m just biased because that’s what I do when my ambitions don’t line up with the ambitions my employer has for me. Also, I like to think that murder is a last resort and that even in cozies people kill because they see no other options to solve a problem. People with bad bosses generally have other options. Particularly in larger towns.

One name not on Whitney’s suspect list, is Whitney herself. The police find her a person of interest, though. Whitney decides she must find the killer. If only to soothe the nerves of potential buyers of her house that there is still a killer out there.

Her and her cousin Buck’s approach is that of offence is the best defence. They visit potential suspects at their homes and ask them flat out if they have killed the victim. Surprisingly, none take the opportunity to confess.

There were some further eye-rolling moments, but the overall story was nice enough. I didn’t care for the chapters that were close third person of the cat. I'm a little undecided between two and three starts, but I'm probably not adverse to reading another book in the series, so three stars makes more sense.

There is one thing I truly detest as a cozy trope and that is a killer that use poison, a knife or whatever is convenient to kill, but when confronting the sleuth

Spoiler

pulls a gun. And this killer went beyond the trope by pulling a gun, dropping it when he flees, then pulling another gun an hour later when the police catch up with him.

Fijne Feelgood.

Er stonden wel een paar foutjes in die er door de redactie uitgehaald hadden mogen worden:

Spoiler

* Hidde heeft om negen uur 's avonds een video call met een aandeelhouder in China. Het is dan drie uur 's ochtends in China.
* Stella krijgt een contract aangeboden: Freelance en fulltime en Willemijn is heel coulant met vakantiedagen. Eh, dat is gewoon een contract in loondienst. Freelancers werken op opdrachtbasis.

This story starts about two weeks after the events of the previous book. The opening chapters heavily reference those events - without giving spoilers for book three. Not having read the previous book, I did feel left in the dark a little too much.

That said, I didn't enjoy this is much as books 1 and 2 in this series.

The action is late to start. Ellery does a lot of guessing on flimsy evidence.

And the last chapter is annoyingly called "Epilogue" while it really was a "Chapter Twenty".

It was ok, but I wasn't wowed by it or the characters.

At some point I wondered what would be left of the book if all the non-mystery bits were taken out.