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(Review based on a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley UK)
Murder mystery where victims, killers and motives proliferate.
In this novel, there’s no whittling-down of suspects, either for murders or police corruption and attempts to pervert the course of justice.
The heroine is a Cornish crime scene investigator, who finds several pieces of significant evidence to do with a number of possibly separate cases, starting with what looks like an accidental death of an environmental campaigner in the splendidly ambiguous “Death Watch Cottage”, whilst going through an extremely bad time as a soon to be homeless single mother with a teenage daughter and with accusations of professional misconduct and even corruption flying in more than one direction. All of which makes it very hard to correctly understand the true, or the full, significance of anything until it has all been found, and even then the proper context is supplied by a single crucial but not very noticeable fact mentioned outside of the active investigation itself.
And even when the investigator has solved all the known crimes to her own satisfaction and their housing issues to her daughter’s satisfaction, there’s a twist still to come when her thoughts turn to a mystery connected with the same Death Watch Cottage from several years before the killing which triggered her investigation.
The rich list of suspects includes: a property developer, a different sort of environmental campaigner to the deceased, a possible gang of anti-second home vandals, an adulteress, a bullying police inspector, a publisher of illegal voyeuristic pornography and a teenage porn addict with an online handle of “Tate Boy” and a diminishing list of friends. The puzzle is not so much to sort out the innocent from the guilty as to match the offenders to the correct offences, which is really quite absorbing for the reader.
Death Watch Cottage by T. Orr Munroe is published in the UK by HQ on the 26th of March 2026
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