Astrid Hawk
Read as a First Reads July 2026 selection. This book was fine - hence the 3 star rating. Pacing is steady, the prose is professional, and the plot progresses rationally - all signs that this is an experienced author who has honed her craft.
However, as seems to be increasingly common these days, the title promises something that the book is... not quite. Lyssa Moore is a biography writer who lives in Oxford, and when she's hired to write the biography of a (possibly misunderstood) party girl lover of a rock musician from the 60s, she uncovers a lot of suspicious motivations and hidden truths wrapped up in her subject's story. Ultimately, this leads Lyssa to try to figure out who the woman really was, and whether her death was really the accident it's accepted to be.
The title makes it sound like this will be a fun buddy mystery - sort of a modern adult Nancy Drew. But it really isn't. Lyssa does discuss her work with her group of friends who live in her building, but they don't really accompany her on her fact-finding missions, and most of the book consists of Lyssa's interviews, 1 on 1, with various descendents and relatives of figures from her subject's life. Her friends do have distinct personalities, but because her interactions with them are few, they mostly just exist as caricatures of NPCs rather than critical characters in the story.
Because everyone Lyssa is writing about is actually dead, and her subject's controversial death occurred in the 60s so has long gone "cold", Lyssa has to gather information entirely through speaking to surviving relatives of the book's subjects and occasionally asking them to look for family heirlooms or records. As a result, the book reads more like a procedural than a live mystery. The so-called "Oxford Detective Society" doesn't have crime scenes to explore, or even suspects houses and offices to look through in secret. The entire book is interviews (with one brief car chase scene) - so it almost doesn't feel like a detective story at all.
That said, it wasn't a bad book, especially for a First Reads selection. It just isn't remarkable.
Read as a First Reads July 2026 selection. This book was fine - hence the 3 star rating. Pacing is steady, the prose is professional, and the plot progresses rationally - all signs that this is an experienced author who has honed her craft.
However, as seems to be increasingly common these days, the title promises something that the book is... not quite. Lyssa Moore is a biography writer who lives in Oxford, and when she's hired to write the biography of a (possibly misunderstood) party girl lover of a rock musician from the 60s, she uncovers a lot of suspicious motivations and hidden truths wrapped up in her subject's story. Ultimately, this leads Lyssa to try to figure out who the woman really was, and whether her death was really the accident it's accepted to be.
The title makes it sound like this will be a fun buddy mystery - sort of a modern adult Nancy Drew. But it really isn't. Lyssa does discuss her work with her group of friends who live in her building, but they don't really accompany her on her fact-finding missions, and most of the book consists of Lyssa's interviews, 1 on 1, with various descendents and relatives of figures from her subject's life. Her friends do have distinct personalities, but because her interactions with them are few, they mostly just exist as caricatures of NPCs rather than critical characters in the story.
Because everyone Lyssa is writing about is actually dead, and her subject's controversial death occurred in the 60s so has long gone "cold", Lyssa has to gather information entirely through speaking to surviving relatives of the book's subjects and occasionally asking them to look for family heirlooms or records. As a result, the book reads more like a procedural than a live mystery. The so-called "Oxford Detective Society" doesn't have crime scenes to explore, or even suspects houses and offices to look through in secret. The entire book is interviews (with one brief car chase scene) - so it almost doesn't feel like a detective story at all.
That said, it wasn't a bad book, especially for a First Reads selection. It just isn't remarkable.