In Peppermint Peril

The mystery was twisty and the setting was good! To be honest though this is more of a 3.5 for me because I just didn't love any of the characters. Now, [slight spoiler] some of the truly hateful characters do turn around by the end of the book, and that's awesome. But it was a little hard getting far enough into the book to see them change.

Also – this is a super small, grammarian thing, so please forgive me for saying it! – the author writes dialogue in kind of a confusing way. Anytime someone does something while speaking, she breaks it into two paragraphs instead of one, often just using a pronoun to introduce the new dialogue. I find that makes me work harder to follow the conversation– and as an author who really works hard on my dialogue, it feels sloppy to me. I'm not a devoted Christie reader but I have noticed that Agatha Christie formatted dialogue in a similar style and her influence is really clear in this book. (In both good and – in this case, to me – less-good ways.) There might not be anything technically wrong with doing that, it just is a tiny pet peeve of mine. Rant over! xD

In short, Agatha Christie and classic mystery fans will probably want to give this one a look!