The Secrets of Bones: A Mystery (Jazz Ramsey Mystery, #2)

by Kylie Logan

Second in a new series from national bestselling author Kylie Logan, The Secrets of Bones is a riveting mystery following Jazz Ramsey as she trains a cadaver dog.

Assembly Day at St. Catherine's dawns bright and cloudless as professional woman gather from all around Ohio to talk to the schoolgirls about their careers ranging from medicine, to NASA, to yoga. Jazz Ramsey has also signed up to give the girls a taste of her lifelong passion: cadaver dog training. Her adorable new puppy Wally hasn't been certified yet, so she borrows the fully-trained Gus from a friend and hides a few bones in the unused fourth floor of the school for him to find.

The girls are impressed when Gus easily finds the first bone, but then Gus heads confidently to a part of the floor where Jazz is sure no bones are hidden--at least not any that she's put there. But Gus is a professional, and sure enough, behind a door that no one has opened in ages, is a human skeleton. Jazz recognizes the necklace the skeleton is wearing, and that it belonged to Bernadette Quinn, an ex-teacher at the school who'd quit her job abruptly one Christmas break. But now it seems Bernadette never left the school at all, and her hiding place makes it clear: this was murder.

Bernadette in life had been a difficult personality, and so there are a plethora of suspects inside the school and out of it. As Jazz gets closer to the truth she can't help but wonder if someone might be dogging her footsteps...

• ISBN10: 1250782163
• ISBN13: 9781250782168
• Publish Date: 30 March 2021 (first published 8 June 2020)
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: St Martin's Press
• Format: Paperback (US Mass Market)
• Pages: 352
• Language: English

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

The Secrets of Bones is the second Jazz Ramsey mystery by Kylie Logan. Released 5th May by Macmillan on their Minotaur imprint, it's 336 pages and available in hardcover, mass market paperback, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

I love books which feature working dogs. In fact, I am a huge fan of books which feature animals, full stop. Apart from the discovery scene, where protagonist Jazz's cadaver dog finds the body of a nun in a Catholic school, dogs feature quite little in the plot. This is a more hard-edged plot, there's little humor and more realism, but it stands on the cozy-ish end of the spectrum. The language and content are clean, there's very little cursing and no sexual content. The amateur sleuth aspect was maybe slightly over the top, she gets on with sifting evidence and investigating the murder/disappearance of victim Bernadette unhindered, and remarkably unhindered by the police.

The plot seemed to drag a bit for me. Particularly in the middle of the book, there were side threads and distractions which went on for ages. I found myself having to fight the urge to skim pages. When reading (and especially when I'm reading for review), that's something I don't do, so this read took me much longer than normal to finish. I kept putting the book down instead of skipping ahead. The dialogue and characterizations were well done and I didn't have trouble keeping the characters straight. I'm not sure how realistic the teachers' and staff reactions to the students' misbehaviors were, but it wasn't too egregious and I didn't find myself being yanked out of my suspension of disbelief often, at least.

The denouement and resolution were foreshadowed fairly heavily, but still felt cartoonish and over-the-top. This book does work well as a standalone. I don't feel the need to go back and read the first book in the series.

Three and a half stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.