Review: Naughty on Ice

Title: Naughty on Ice
Author: Maia Chance
Publication Date: November 13, 2018
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Recommended If You Like: cozy mysteries, strong female heroines, settings around Christmastime, romance

The Book:

Lola and Berta, the detectives of The Discreet Retrieval Agency, find themselves suddenly suspects in a murder when they are caught by police holding the ring they have been hired to find, right after someone in the house is poisoned. Forbidden to leave the town until the case is solved, Lola and Berta work to solve the case themselves, and get themselves out alive before Christmas.

What I Liked:

I really enjoyed the first entry in this series, and my enjoyment continued with this book. Lola and Berta are such great, unique, fun characters, and Lola is a narrator who you just want to be friends with. This book really has everything you could want in a cozy mystery-great characters, romance, a unique setting, a mystery full of twists and turns-and so much more-ski jumping! family drama! secret rendezvous! the legend of a bear who walks on two legs!

Anything I Didn't Like?

The solution to the mystery got a little convoluted for me. I loved the surprise element of it, but I had to do a bit of re reading of the ending to make sure I got it all.

So...?

I definitely recommend this series. The characters are great, the romance is one to root for, and the mysteries always keep you on your toes.

Review: Crippen

The focus of this book is a fictionalized account of the Dr. Crippen murder case. What is known as facts are that Dr. Crippen's wife was murdered, and that Dr. Crippen and his lover Ethel Le Neve tried to get to Canada on a boat posing as a man and his son.

What I love most about this book is that even knowing about the Crippen case, even having read books on it before, Boyne still manages to absolutely surprise and shock me as the plot progresses. I would get so caught up in the story that I would forget what I knew. And because of how little is truly known about the case, Boyne is able to hypothesize and theorize in a brilliantly written way that actually made my mouth drop open at one point and just stand there in public, flipping back pages.

I highly recommend this book, it's so well-written, and does such an impressive job of taking a famous historical crime and still making it feel new.