English author Jess Kidd has a varied bibliography that ranges across a number of genres. Her book Things in Jars was a gothic, supernatural mystery story while The Night Ship dealt with the story of the 17th century wreck of the Batavia off the Australian coast. With her latest book, Murder at Gulls Nest, set on the English coast in the 1950s, Kidd dives into a much-loved sub-genre – the cosy English village murder mystery with an intelligent, nosey and intuitive ageing woman at the centre.
Nora Breen has been a nun for thirty years but has left her convent to find her missing friend Frieda. Frieda, ten years younger than Nora, also left the convent and had been living in a boarding house on the English coast, regularly sending letters back to Nora about her life. The letters stop and the final one hinted at fellow residents with secrets. Nora knows something is wrong and heads to the same boarding house to investigate. As she is starting to get a feel for the guests a young newlywed dies, a suspected suicide which Nora believes is murder. While the police are not keen for an elderly, amateur investigator (who has learnt everything she knows from crime fiction books) to intrude, Nora stays on the case.
Kidd deploys plenty of suspects and secrets, red herrings and then reveals which turn the things that readers think they know about the characters on their head. And she does a good job bringing this tired, grey, post-war British seaside village to life. But in the end Murder at Gulls Nest does not deliver any more than a down-the-line cosy Agatha Christie-style murder mystery anchored around an elderly amateur sleuth. For many readers, though, this is likely to be enough.
Murder at Gulls Nest by Jess Kidd
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