A Fatal Gilded High Note

If you follow me on goodreads, you’ll see I rounded this review up to a 4 out of 5 stars, whereas I typically round down (yes I know this flies in the face of everything we learned about rounding in school, but I have my reasons).

A Fatal Gilded High Note follows Roddy and Val DeVere as they search for the killer of Coal King Leon Rankin, who was murdered during the opera in the box next to the DeVere’s.

For starters, I really liked the idea behind this novel. The characters are funny and witty and have enjoyable personalities. The ending of the novel was quite the plot twist, which (if you’ve followed me for any length of time now, you know) is a major bonus for me. I definitely didn’t see the ending coming the way that it did…it was simultaneously satisfying and frustrating all at the same time.

The drawback for me was that there was A LOT going on in the plot that didn’t feel necessarily relevant. I kept getting bogged down in all of the detail surrounding Val’s extracurricular activities and social justice movements. It made the story move kind of slowly, and there was just a ton of information to take in from both an extracurricular standpoint as well as a pertinent-to-the-plot standpoint.

As a New York lawyer, Roddy is able to decipher a lot of the information that drives the investigation, which was helpful, since there was a lot to unpack and understand how everything connected to each of the suspects. There were moments, though, where it felt like over-explanation was being done, just to make sure the reader really knew what was going on, which I didn’t love. I prefer when an author is able to determine when a reader will need help connecting dots and when a reader is able to infer information from the text.

Admittedly, the middle of this book was rough for me. I really liked the beginning and the end, but the middle was definitely a struggle due to all of the detail being thrown at the reader and the depth/details of the side plots. Now, when I first started this novel, I had no idea it was part of a series. Upon reaching the last page, that became readily apparent, which made the side plots and the level of detail associated with them more understandable, and thus forgivable.

As far as cozy mysteries go, this one isn’t a favorite, but I enjoyed it enough to want to read more of Val and Roddy’s adventures.

*I received a complimentary copy of this book from BookSirens and the review above is a voluntary review*

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