WELCOME TO MURDER WEEK

A young woman travels to England after discovering tickets to a murder mystery week purchased by her estranged late mother.

Thirty-four-year-old Cath Little lives a quiet life in Buffalo, New York, inhabiting the Victorian house she inherited from the grandmother who raised her and running an optician business she acquired from her retired neighbor. It’s been several months since a stroke killed 55-year-old Skye Sanders Little, and Cath is still reluctant to go through the boxes left to her. Having survived a lonely childhood that featured brief, intermittent visits from the itinerant Skye, Cath has mixed feelings as she finally tackles the remnants of her mother's possessions. But amid the unpaid bills and other detritus, Cath finds a receipt showing that her financially strapped mother paid for two tickets to “solve a ‘genuine fake English-village murder mystery’” in the Peak District. Reluctant but curious, Cath is soon sharing a cozy cottage in the village of Willowthrop, teaming up with housemates Wyatt Green, who unhappily works in his husband’s birding shop in New Jersey, and Amity Clark, a divorced romance writer from California. The trio’s quest to solve the fake mystery also becomes an investigation of the real-life mystery of Cath’s mother. What was her connection to Willowthrop? Along the way, Cath enjoys a romantic fling with a handsome maker of artisanal gin. Dukess follows up on her touching coming-of-age debut, The Last Book Party (2019), with a charming and funny homage to cozy mysteries. All the genre’s tropes are here: the clever amateur sleuths, the quaint setting, “the vicar, the nosy neighbor, and the village doctor.” But this is also a poignant, redemptive tale of a grief-stricken daughter reconciling her troubled past with her promising future.

An entertaining whodunit with a touch of heartwarming pathos.