Mother-Daughter Murder Night by Nina Simon

 

This is a competently-written novel, I guess, but it didn't do a lot for me. The story wasn't wildly bad, exactly: There are some twists, but they aren't complete rugpulls, everything makes at least some sense with regard to what's come before it; the events unfold with some tension; the various conflicts that can emerge in and with a community, centered on a biggish plot of land, are pretty clearly drawn. The prose sits very much on the right side of competent. Unfortunately, the more time the novel spent with a character, the less interested I became with them. I guess you can't have an amateur detective mystery novel without the police seeming like morons (collectively, there are one or maybe two exceptions) but here that's done with a very broad hand and a very heavy brush. The main characters' relationships seem irredeemably toxic to me, all various strains of utterly blinkered self-regard; the primary amateur detective, here, is probably the worst; the youngest of them is at least fifteen and might grow out of it.