annieb123
Originally posted on my blog Nonstop Reader.
Four-Alarm Homicide is the sixth House-Flipper mystery by Diane Kelly. Released 23rd April 2024 by Macmillan on their St. Martin's imprint, it's 304 pages and is available in paperback, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links.
This is an engaging and well written cozy mystery with a full complement of quirky neighbors, old houses to fix-up-and-resell (a fire station in this case), plucky female amateur sleuth, requisite grumpy (and handsome) law enforcement officer, remodel house neighbor/murder victim, resultant investigations, and a cat who gets some 3rd person narrative alternating with his owner, protagonist house-flipper Whitney. The chapters are labeled with the primary PoV character, so they're easy to keep track of.
The writing is appealing and entertaining, very light and engaging. The language is clean, the violence is off page, there's nothing to horrify or scandalize. The denouement is well written and the book moves along at a good clip. It's an enjoyable and engaging light read. The plot is self contained in this volume and works well enough as a standalone. It's exactly the kind of fun cozy to enjoy on a lazy weekend afternoon.
With 6 books extant in the series at the current time (it's an ongoing series), and a publishing schedule of roughly 1 series book/year, this would be a good choice for a long binge or buddy read.
Four stars.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes