Review: "Mystery at Farfield Castle" by Clare Chase

Mystery at Farfield Castle by Clare Chase
Eve Mallow Mysteries #10
Published May 2023 via Bookoture
★★★

Officially, Eve's job is to write obituaries. Unofficially, though, she has a habit of stumbling across dead bodies...and a talent for solving the mystery before the rather inept detectives can. In Mystery at Farfield Castle, Eve has accepted a request to write about something else—there shouldn't be any murders to solve at a new writing retreat set at an old castle, right? ...right? But before long, of course, Eve is right in it (with her silent but trusty sidekick/familiar/doggo, Gus), trying to figure out who killed Kitty Marchant, one of the owners of the retreat.

I went into this cozy relatively blind, which is to say that it's book 10 in a series of which I have not read books 1–9. I'm happy to report that although there are several threads for storylines that clearly span numerous books, this stands alone. The mystery isn't quite a locked-room sort (there are too many random people on the grounds of the castle when Kitty is killed), but it's clear early on that there are only a few viable suspects, some of whom have reason to resent Kitty and her husband's purchase of the castle...and some of whom might have more personal reasons to want Kitty dead. Not a lot of big twists here, but plenty of small clues that add up to keep you guessing until the end. Eve being a reporter, too, gives her the excuse (not just for the other characters, but for the reader) to dig a bit into personal lives—she knows things that the average attendee might not when she shows up, but that makes sense because Eve has done her due diligence.

The real reason I read the book was the setting—a writer's retreat at a castle! I cannot possibly be the only person who daydreams of winning the lottery and setting up exactly that. (In fact, I know I am not, because I have seen many memes to that effect.) To that end, while I knew going in that the murder takes place at the launch party rather than when a bunch of writers are there, I would have liked quite a bit more, well, castle out of this. This is a personal quirk, I think (I live in a studio apartment and wouldn't want to deal with the upkeep of a many-roomed castle, thanks, but I would like to imagine myself in the castle library), but in books set in castles, or manors, or just big, old houses, I tend to want the building to be almost a character in and of itself. Even more specifically, I want to see how another writer imagines a castle-as-writing-retreat to be set up.

I'll have to look elsewhere to get my writing-retreat-castle kicks, then, but as a cozy mystery this was a lot of fun. Hurray for heroines who know enough to call in backup.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy via NetGalley.