Murder at Gulls Nest
by Jess Kidd
Genres: Crime, MysteryPages: 336
Series: Nora Breen Investigates #1
Rating:
Synopsis:The first in a sparkling new 1950s seaside mystery series, featuring sharp-eyed former nun Nora Breen.
Somewhere in the north, a religious community prepares for Vespers. Here on the southeast coast, Nora Breen prepares for braised liver and a dining room full of strangers.
Nora Breen arrives inconspicuously in the seaside town of Gore-on-Sea, and takes a room at the Gulls Nest guest house. Supper is at 6 o'clock sharp, and there will be no admittance after 9 - a routine Nora likes, as it reminds her of her former life as a nun.
As she settles in, she is careful not to reveal too much about herself to the other guests. Instinct tells her it's better to watch and listen. Because Nora is not here on a whim. She has a disappearance to investigate.
Before long, Nora realises that she may not be the only resident hiding something at Gulls Nest. To untangle the web of secrets and deceit, she'll need to do more than just observe. Does she have what it takes to stop a killer?
Jess Kidd’s Murder at Gulls Nest surprised me by being written in present tense; it’s not something you see a lot, and it didn’t always 100% work for me — I like it in short fiction, but I find it hard to sustain in my own writing, and at times I thought there was a strain here too. I also thought there were some very weird turns of phrase that felt like someone reaching for half-remembered words and applying them wrongly; the one I wrote down while reading was “pertaining to be [another person]”. I think Kidd needed ‘pretending’ here — or some other phrasing entirely.
As for the story itself, well: I enjoyed the choice of protagonist/amateur detective. Nora is an ex-nun who left her convent in order to discover what happened to another ex-nun who had left because of her health and suddenly stopped writing to Nora. She assumes foul play pretty much from the start, and it feels weird how reckless she is about the way she reveals her identity to some and not others. The narrative doesn’t even remark on that, there aren’t any consequences, which honestly makes it feel like the author’s oversight at times.
I found Nora in general to be a bit… inconsistent? I can understand that to a degree we’re seeing someone breaking out of a mould and learning who she is outside of the convent, but some of her actions feel erratic — like throwing her shoes at the duty sergeant, and letting herself being photographed dancing around wearing only a curtain — and I had trouble reconciling it all as believable variation in the behaviour of a single fully compos mentis person with control over her own actions, even though I’m certain we’re supposed to believe that she is.
The same applied to other characters too, and particularly Rideout, who seems to entirely lack professionalism. When other details felt grittily realistic, that kind of cavalier attitude to keeping civilians out of police work felt weird.
I think overall it all just… didn’t quite come together for me. It was entertaining, and the mystery hung together alright, but something was just a bit off in the narrative.
Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)
