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  Jocelyn_Phoenix

  26 января 2026

  This was mostly an okay book, and that’s about it.
  
  It has many “English detective story” tropes: there is a castle with sprawling grounds, an eccentric old lady, a will, a bunch of people fighting for inheritance, multiple skeletons in multiple closets, a very smart and quirky amateur detective… This is not a bad recipe at all, but I didn’t feel like this book did anything particularly remarkable with it.
  
  The great aunt could have been an interesting character: a woman trying to prevent her own murder, obsessing with people surrounding her and investigating all their misdeeds and potential motives. However, we only meet her as a teen on the pages of her diary before all this happened. And in the present, she is dead, and we only hear other people talking about her, and it’s all very much “I don’t have a map, I have a picture of a map”. But if I liked this book more, I’d probably be wishing for a prequel featuring her as the main character - even though I don’t generally like prequels.
  
  The great aunt is also used as a tool to set up the series, including a very not subtle hint at the end of the book that “there probably are a bunch of murder investigations in her files”. There seem to be quite a few things that are mentioned to hint at potential events and character developments in future books, and I don’t know how I feel about there being so many and them being so obvious, especially when I don’t think I’m going to continue reading the series.
  
  Overall, an okay book with a woefully underused interesting character which tries to set up series too hard.
  

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