A Fatal Booking by Victoria Gilbert

Available June 7, 2022

Charlotte is hosting a former colleague and her book club at Chapters for the week. When the group arrives Charlotte is surprised by the relationships between them as they bicker their way through the first day of activities. No one is surprised when the least popular of the group is found dead in the garden, her tea poisoned. It's up to Charlotte to determine which of the readers was responsible before the killer strikes again.

The B & B and the book theme have taken an increasingly prominent role in the stories as this series comes along and that's been fun. We also get to see Charlotte beginning to recover from the loss of her husband and start to form a romantic attachment. Ellen is a fun character, just on the edge of unbelievable. The only thing that was kind of a downside to this book for me was that none of the suspects were ever eliminated and the sleuths don't solve the case. Though Charlotte and Ellen and a few of their book club friends were doing some investigating, nothing they found ever narrowed down the suspect list. There were a couple of times when this could have been done, one of them could have had no access to the murder weapon, at one point when the killer was out and about one of the club members could have still been at the B & B the whole time. I like it when progress is being made in the investigations, when the sleuth is gradually getting closer and closer to a resolution to the case. In this book the sleuths don't actually solve the case, the killer simply chooses to reveal themselves to Charlotte and Ellen for reasons that are somewhat unclear.

I enjoy this series and think the changes that are coming up present great opportunities for more varied mysteries in future books. I look forward to reading the next!

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC.