The Dark Lake hits all the notes of good grip lit, but I was never quite fully engaged. The plot follows a popular grip lit trope — a beautiful woman from the heroine’s high school is murdered and scandals from the past come to light. The heroine in this case is DS Gemma Woodstock, who grew up in the town and so is privy to lots of the residents’ secrets. The mystery was solid, and Bailey unveils various mini-reveals as Gemma slowly but surely uncovers the truth behind Rosalind’s murder.

Unfortunately, nothing about it really grabbed me. It felt a fairly standard example of the genre, with nothing quite making it stand out. I didn’t predict the big reveal, but I also didn’t feel invested enough in the story to care much about it.

The pacing felt slow, and the personal dramas around Gemma’s life felt like a bigger part of the story than the actual mystery. Unfortunately, her personal dramas weren’t all that interesting. She has a son with a serious boyfriend whom she doesn’t love but stays with because of the child, and she’s carrying on an illicit romance with her married co-worker. But the stakes never quite feel high enough. She’s worried about her boyfriend finding out, but she also wants to leave him so I don’t quite get what the problem is. She’s also angsty about her co-worker still having a relationship with his wife, but their romance seems more convenient than any great source of passion. There’s also a couple of random scenes involving roses and her son where the mystery infringes on her real life, but these plot threads mostly just meandered to a close. On one particularly dramatic event, the resolution came about so quickly that I actually missed the bit where the resolution actually happened; I just turned the page and saw that subplot had concluded.

The high school flashbacks were interesting but not quite explored enough. Gemma sets Rosalind up as a larger than life gorgeous creature whom all the men swooned over, but we never quite get a real sense of who Rosalind is. Even as an object of desire, Rosalind falls flat, and apart from being high school classmates, I didn’t quite understand why Gemma cared so much about her. There’s a hint of her personality in a flashback scene about an English class in high school, and I wish there had been more of that.

We also learn about Gemma’s high school boyfriend who died as a teen and left behind a younger brother. There’s a connection to the mystery because the younger brother was in a school play that Rosalind directed and that opened the night of the murder. And all of Gemma’s emotionality over her high school boyfriend’s death ties into the larger story as we learn more from flashbacks later on, but for most of the book, it just felt like an annoying detour that kept cropping up.

Overall, Dark Lake is a solid, entertaining thriller that unfortunately doesn’t quite stand out for me.

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Thank you to Hachette Book Group Canada for an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

Six Degrees of Freedom is about three characters: Lisa, a young woman who wants to be rich; Eric, her best friend who is agoraphobic, a tech genius, and determined to be a millionaire by 18; and Jay, a woman in her 30s who is serving out a sentence for identity fraud by working for the RCMP tech department. The story begins with Lisa and Eric building a hot air balloon that will take a digital camera up almost into space, and take pictures of its journey.

Fast forward several years into the future. Eric is now a young shipping magnate millionaire, Lisa has a job she doesn’t enjoy, and Jay is on the RCMP team investigating a mysterious shipping container with a potential link to terrorism. The camera Lisa and Eric sent in a hot air balloon as children will play a significant part in how their stories intersect, and it’s pretty cool to see how an act of such childlike enthusiasm could have such far-reaching effects.

There are things I enjoyed about this book. I loved the beginning, with Lisa and Eric’s tinkering, and the way the camera was traced back to them years later. I also liked the character of Jay, and her detective work around the shipping container.

But the pacing was slow and I found my attention lagging at times. There were also times when I wasn’t quite sure where the story was heading or what the point of the characters actions was. The language was also cumbersome at times, although I don’t know if that’s because of Dickner or his translator Lazer Lederhendler. For example, one character is described as spending a flight “in the depths of a bituminous slumber” (page 17), which according to Google, refers to a type of coal or asphalt, and doesn’t help make the description any clearer.

I also didn’t quite understand the point of Lisa’s scheme with Eric’s invention. He builds an intelligent, responsive technology that can deliver consumer goods more efficiently, and Lisa tells him that’s a waste of its potential, so they should instead use his invention for a brilliant idea she had. I understand what she did with the invention and I can see how what she did links thematically to Jay’s story with Jay having “a problem with geography,” but I don’t quite understand Lisa’s larger vision. I can see how it’s beneficial for both of them on a personal level, but in the grander scheme of things, I don’t quite get the wow factor. Likely as a result of this, the ending fell flat for me. There was a flurry of activity towards the end, but I didn’t quite understand what the point was.

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Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I’m a huge fan of Agatha Christie and English village whodunnits, so I expected to like this a lot more than I did. Murder in Little Shendon had all the usual elements of the genre: a murder victim who was widely disliked, a village full of suspects, and a likeable team of detectives both professional and amateur. One of the mystery-solving team is even an actor, and I’m a sucker for any theatre-related story. Even the manner of death is pretty good — the victim was killed by a candlestick in his own shop, and I thought the choice of weapon and the way characters referred to it were a nice shoutout to the classic whodunnit game Clue.

Richardson also avoids a lot of the usual problems that annoy me in contemporary Christie-type cozies. None of the characters are too cutesy for words, none of the leads are Mary Sue-level perfect, and none of the jokes were cringe-worthy. At one point, I even felt like I was watching an episode of Midsomer Murders, which I love.

Despite the promising beginning, I ended up getting bored about halfway through. The characters were all quirky without being particularly memorable. I found myself getting confused by the large cast, and found that while each had a strong personality trait, none particularly stood out for me. The pacing as well was slow, which is expected in this type of mystery, but it lacked a clear sense of the movement towards the big reveal.

Richardson is a good writer, so I’m hard-pressed to pinpoint exactly what went wrong for me with this book. I’m afraid it just didn’t work for me, despite its genre being right up my alley.

Murder in Little Shendon is the first in a series featuring Sir Victor Hazlitt and Shakespearean actor Beresford Brandon. Below are the other books in the series.

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Thank you to the author for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.