The Murder Plot: An utterly gripping cozy crime novel by Alice CastleMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
It's the Christmas holidays and Beth Haldane is safely ensconced with her son at home. Her BFF Katie and family have gone skiing leaving Beth a bit high-and-dry, until she befriends another mum at the school gates, Nina. Nina is most definitely not like all the other Dulwich Village school mums, first off she works for a living as receptionist/dogsbody to a local solicitor, and second she is very working class. (There is a dreadful running joke that Nina gets all her proverbs/well-known sayings wrong eg, 'take it to the gravy' instead of 'take it to the grave', it's not in the least bit funny and it's rather unkind).
Anyway, Nina is convinced that her boss, Mr Potter is up to no good and persuades Beth to cover for her as receptionist while NIna looks after Beth's son (looking after consisting of feeding oven chips and fish fingers and plonking him in front of the TV all day). Soon Beth is breaking into her boss' office and trying to unlock his desk and filing cabinets.
Meanwhile, there is a spate of dogs dying, possibly poisoned, which has got the yummy mummies up in arms.
The romance with DI Heath has progressed, although I suspect Alice Castle is having second thoughts as neither seems particularly happy, especially since Beth seems to solve more cases that the police do.
This is the fourth book in the series that I have read and my feeling is that these are so 'cosy/cozy' that there is very little detecting involved, we read a lot about coffee in chi-chi shops and expensive handbags, and cat hairs then out of thin air Beth solves the crime without (as my maths teacher used to say) showing the workings. It is always as an afterthought that someone asks 'how did you know that X was the murderer' just so we the readers can find out what happened. These are okay but TBH if I didn't have the eighth book sitting on my TBR pile as an ARC and the books are all on Kindle Unlimited I probably wouldn't bother reading any more.
Read on my Kindle Unlimited subscription.
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