The Mermaid Murder

(3.5 Stars)

I enjoyed reading this but don't think it matches the quality of previous books in the series.

Things felt very wrapped up at the end of Girl Blue, so it makes sense that this one is more of a shift from Rachel and Mason to the (now adult) “kids”. You get almost equal Jeremy/Misty/Christy perspectives. It's adds something fresh to the series, but at 248 pages it comes at the expense of character depth. I feel like we barely spent time with any one. Characters just endlessly circle around the same talking points, Rachel's NFP almost seems like an afterthought, and Mason is boiled down to existing solely for Rachel's emotional support and to occasionally flash a badge. Josh's absence is explained away in one line and never really brought up again.

Two things were very jarring for me and that was the time jump and all the discussion about the pandemic. You go from Rachel and Mason wanting to get married in two weeks to several years later, still unmarried. You don't really get any information on those missing years aside from how things were affected by the pandemic. This is probably a personal nitpick of mine, but I don't need this much realism in my books. I lived it. I don't need to hear over and over about how things were cancelled and stalled. It didn't add anything to the book for me.

The actual mystery was intriguing but felt unfinished for me too. There's no explanation of how certain things happened and only the most basic motive of why.

Overall I think this book is doing too much in too short an amount of pages. It feels like the series peaked and is now on a down swing. Even just from a writing standpoint, this needed another pass from an editor. Multiple examples of missing words and punctuation. I'm on the fence about continuing the series (assuming there's more coming), but for sure my excitement has died down.