Seams Like Murder

by Tilly Wallace

Genres: Crime, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Mystery
Pages: 234
Series: Grace Designs Mysteries #1
Rating:

Synopsis:

There are two things that can’t talk—moving pictures and dead showgirls…

1920, Wellington, New Zealand. Grace Devine is poised to build her thriving dress design business as the twenties begin to soar. But when a fashionable client is murdered, suspicion falls on Grace as the last person to see Agatha alive.

As wary clients cancel and business begins to fail, Grace decides there’s only one way to prove her innocence and save her career…this seamstress will turn sleuth to find who really murdered the showgirl.

The more she learns, the more she uncovers of the darker side of the dead woman’s personality. Agatha liked to collect secrets and use them against people. But what target snapped that fatal night? Can Grace stitch together the clues before her life is torn apart…

These heart-warming historical mysteries will send you on a unique New Zealand adventure.

Tilly Wallace’s Seams Like Murder is a short, quick read, set in New Zealand post-WWI. Grace is trying to set up her own fashion house, starting small, and hampered by being a single mother with a “husband” who died in the war (and, the subtext suggests, because she wasn’t actually married to him at all, though I don’t think that’s confirmed in so many words in this book). She has a strong support network, though, with a mentor, a close friend who lives nearby, her father, a cousin, and her husband’s brother — and this was an aspect of the story I rather enjoyed, since they each supported her in their own way.

The mystery itself is relatively obvious, and works out in a relatively obvious way. There’s a hint that there’s potentially to be a romance with the “dishy” detective, which leaves me pretty cold: there’s some genuine chemistry between Grace and her husband’s brother, in a complicated way, and that’s what we actually see any build-up for at all. There are other books in the series, so I guess any further development with the detective happens there, but I’m not super inclined at this moment to follow.

I should note as well that there’s a fantasy element to the story, totally not discussed in the cover copy: Grace has the ability to touch someone and pick up memories that they’re thinking about at the time. The constraints of the gift are fairly undefined in this book, and I find it a bit odd that this element is played down so much in the copy. Seems like a good way to annoy one audience (the historical mystery fans) and miss another completely (the fantasy mystery fans).

In any case, as I mentioned, I’m not really inclined to read more of this series. This book was entertaining enough that I didn’t think about stopping it, and I did enjoy Grace’s family and support network, which felt genuine and warm. There’s nothing that makes me feel it’s going to go in a direction I’m particularly interested in, but I might read a second book if I run across it in a subscription service I use like Kobo Plus or something (I see the first book is available in Kobo Plus in the US at least, after all), and I want something light. It’s not that I disliked it or anything, it just didn’t click with me in the way I hoped.

Rating: 2/5