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Since I thoroughly enjoyed Jess Kidd’s gothic tale Things in Jars, I had to check out her mystery book Murder at Gulls Nest. And since I enjoyed that, I had to read the second book in the series. Murder at the Spirit Lounge picks up not long after Nora Breen has helped solve the murder of a young novice she had befriended at the monastery where she was a nun for 30 years.
Nora has pretty much nothing to her name and no real plans for her life at this point, but she decides she likes Gore-on-Sea and will stay. And she’ll even stay put at Gulls Nest, with her simple room’s view of the sea. (And despite the dreadful food and “eccentric” fellow boarders.) Now she has to find some work. She knows she’s curious and enjoys puzzles. That includes solving murders, of course, but that shouldn’t be an occasion to seek out or hope for more of.
Naturally, however, since this is a murder mystery series, Nora does get another murder to solve. A whole set of them, even.
The first casualty is Doreen Chimes, a popular psychic who just moved to town over the summer. She does stage shows and private séances. Mrs. Chimes dies during a séance in quite dramatic fashion. Interestingly enough, Detective Inspector Hilary Rideout, whom Nora got to know fairly well during the first book, is one of the six attendees. The psychic personally invited him the day of.
The next murder is someone else who attended the séance. As bodies pile up, Nora seeks to figure out who is responsible, and why. And on top of it, she fears for Rideout, who could very easily be next.
In this book we get a bit more character development. Nora is finding herself as a middle-aged woman who had been shut away from the world for all of her adult life. She is trying to navigate, unexpectedly enough, having two men admiring her (not that she fully sees that’s what’s happening).
I actually figured out fairly early on who was committing the murders, just not precisely … well, I can’t say any more. You’ll see. But that didn’t take away my enjoyment of seeing how it all played out. And just seeing how Nora handles things — again, not necessarily danger or solving mysteries, but handling complexities of relationships — is an interesting part of the reading experience.
Rated: High, pretty much just due to some uses of the f-word by two characters in a couple of spots. Profanity includes 9 uses of strong language, around a dozen instances of moderate profanity, about 10 uses of mild language, about 10 instances of the name of Deity in vain, and 27 uses of British (bl-) profanity. Sexual content includes mostly a few allusions to the act happening or having happened. There are a few references to a photo of a woman unclothed but strategically covered. Violence includes a number of murders by varying methods, with descriptions of the results, though not too gory; a couple of suicides.
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*I received an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
