30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 4
Book 4/30
This wasn’t as clever as I wanted it to be, and I think it wasted the premise a bit, but overall I had a fun time reading it, and I finished it in a day, so clearly I can’t have that many complaints.
The main plot features Annie Adams learning that she has just been made an inheritor of her great-aunt Frances’s will, a woman she’s never met, and traveling to the small town of Castle Knoll to meet with her aunt and a lawyer. The thing about Frances is that since she received a particularly ominous fortune reading at the age of sixteen, she has been convinced that she will be murdered, and spent most of her life preparing either to try and counter the murder, or provide her heirs with enough information to bring her killer to justice. She also spent a great deal of time investigating the disappearance of her friend Emily when they were seventeen.
Both of these things become relevant when Frances is found murdered before Annie can even meet her, and suddenly Annie is in competition with Frances’s great-nephew by marriage to solve her murder. Whoever solves her murder inherits her substantial fortune, and they have files of clues to do it with, clues Frances has been collecting for sixty plus years.
For the first half of the book, Annie was way too passive, and that is the main reason for my 3.5 star rating. She didn’t actually start detecting until the last half. Before that, information just came to her. Some of this can be written off by the fact that she was concentrating on learning the town and its residents, something the other guy didn’t need to do because he lived there. She’s also distracted by a journal from Frances’s teenage years which seems to hold vital information. The thing that makes this all workable is that we also do not know these people or this town. But I still think the author could have overcome this in some other way so that her MC was more proactive sooner.
The mystery itself was suitably twisty, and the cozy atmosphere of the town worked nicely with how secretly shady all its residents were.
I think I will be reading on in the series. There was a moment in here that I thought was just lovely* that really was the reason I upped my rating to four stars, and which made me think this author’s writing can get even better. I probably won’t be buying them, though; it will be library all the way.
*SPOILERS Annie thinks about how all the shithead teenagers in Frances’s life/diary all had a chance to grow up and become better people, but Emily (who was a piece of work) never did. It got me all teary! END SPOILERS
[3.5 stars]