Murder Like Clockwork

by Nicole Whyte

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 384
Series: Marchfield Square Mystery #2
Rating:

Synopsis:

An empty house that isn't empty. A victim who vanishes. An impossible crime?

Every Thursday at midday Audrey Brooks cleans the Petrov house. Mr Petrov is never home - in fact he seems to use the house purely as storage for his impressive collection of antiques - but that doesn't affect the care with which Audrey mops, polishes, and carefully winds each of the dozens of beautiful clocks that decorate the tall, elegant, empty London mansion.

Until the morning she finds a corpse in the back bedroom, the pristine walls and floor covered in blood, and flees the house in panic.

Fifteen minutes later, the police arrive... and find nothing. No body. No blood. The only thing slightly out of the ordinary is the clock in that back bedroom, which is now running four minutes slow.

With no victim, the police are convinced there was no murder, but Audrey knows better. A man has been killed, and if they won't do anything about it, she - and her annoying friend Lewis - will. Whodunnit is one thing, but this detective duo must also wrestle with when - and where on earth is the body? It's not long since they solved the murder of their neighbour, so they're not rookie sleuths, and at least this time the case has no connection to their home.

Does it?

I received a copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I requested Nicola Whyte’s Murder Like Clockwork to review after getting a promo email from the publisher about it… which didn’t mention that it’s actually the second book of a series. I would say that for various aspects of the setup, it would’ve been helpful to have read the first book: the characters have history, and there’s clearly backstory for Celeste that would be helpful to contextualise everything.

Because I haven’t read the first book, I’m not sure how much the reader is supposed to know or guess, which makes it hard to judge whether the book is annoyingly coy, or hinting at a backstory that’s building up between books.

The mystery itself, the central one at least, is self-contained, and it was fine. It was easy to guess who was involved and begin to guess at why, just because of the way they were introduced and the details given about them — a sort of structural clue that is hard to avoid with mysteries, admittedly, but felt really obvious here.

The relationship between the main characters was a bit… meh? Again, maybe the context would have helped; as it was, I wasn’t entirely sure why they were spending time together (other than previously solving a mystery together under circumstances not wholly explained in this volume) and why they didn’t dropkick each other into the Thames at times.

Overall, it wasn’t a bad reading experience, but I found the lack of info from the first book quite annoying, and I found it lacked a bit in subtlety. I think the publisher probably did it a disservice in not making it clearer that it was a second book; I might’ve read the first book out of interest, and not requested this one unless I liked that one.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)