In the second installment of the Nora Breen Investigates series—“perfect for cozy mystery lovers” (Book Riot)—beloved former nun Nora Breen returns, this time to track down a ghostly killer before it’s too late.
When Dolores Chimes, a famous medium, arrives in Gore-on-Sea, even surly Detective Inspector Rideout is lured in by her promises of messages for the afterlife.
But after a reading goes disastrously wrong, Dolores loses her life—and the six sitters at the séance with her fall victim to supernatural deaths themselves in the days following the nightmare of a reading.
Determined to unveil the truth, Nora finds herself chasing a ghostly serial killer she believes to be responsible, before the sixth victim—Detective Rideout himself—perishes along with the others.

My Review:

This turned out to be a lot. A very good lot, but a lot. I know I’m going to have to explain that, and I kind of need to in order to process the whole thing. But it’s definitely a good lot.

I’ve been waiting for this one for a while, because I loved Nora Breen’s first investigation, Murder at Gulls Nest and was hoping for more of the same. I certainly got the more, but it couldn’t be exactly the same, because the Nora Breen in this second book isn’t exactly the same Nora Breen that she was in the first book. And she’s certainly more interesting for that.

When Nora first arrived in the seaside community of little Gore-on-Sea, the year was 1954, and it still is in this second book. The difference is that Nora has decided to stay and become part of the community she originally visited while investigating the fate of a friend.

Nora had been the nursing sister at a monastery. She was a nun for three decades. But when a young woman who left the monastery, who Nora thought of as both a friend and a protégé, stopped writing, Nora formally left her vocation and her monastery behind to find her friend, or her friend’s fate, or, if need be as it turned out, her friend’s killer.

She can’t go back to the person she was after involving herself deeply in that investigation – and in the life of Gore-on-Sea. Not that she wouldn’t be allowed back, but rather that she’s decided that door is closed behind her. You can’t unknow what you know, and she can’t turn herself back into the person she was.

She can only go forward. Which means, among other things, finding a job. It also means figuring out who Nora Breen is back out in the world and what she wants to do with this second act of her life. She’s only in her early 50s, she has plenty of life left in her. But she needs both a purpose AND a paycheck.

Tagging along with Detective Inspector Rideout on his case may be a purpose – but it doesn’t pay even Nora’s relatively small expenses. Which doesn’t stop her from realizing that it is what she WANTS to do as well as mostly ignoring the fact that he is who she wants to do it with.

So when Rideout asks her to show up at the scene of a murder in her professional capacity as a nurse and not as his unofficial assistant – or so he claims – she finds herself in the midst of a séance that has already gone terribly, horribly wrong. The medium, Dolores Chimes, was merely supposed to contact the dead. She wasn’t supposed to join them.

Not according to her own plans, at least. But someone else clearly had other ideas, leaving Nora in the thick of yet another murder investigation that shouldn’t have been any of her business. But that she can’t resist sticking her nose (or coulter, as she calls it) into the string of inventive killings – and not just because her friend Rideout is clearly on the list of intended victims.

Escape Rating A-: One of the things I love about this series is that, while the story is well edited, tight and taut as a mystery should be, it’s NOT edited for an American audience. Nor is it edited to update localisms and Britishism and other turns of phrase that were in general usage there and then but were not here and are not now. It adds to the immersion in the time period and makes the characters feel more authentic. I may still be a bit weirded out that the mid-1950s are now considered historical fiction, but I love the way that the time and place are thoroughly invoked and inhabited. The past is another country – even if it’s not all that far past – and they did (and said) things differently there.

As far as the story goes, in the end, I loved this one, and couldn’t turn the pages in the second half of the story nearly fast enough. It took a bit to get stuck into, however, because Nora herself is having a bit of a problem getting stuck into both Gore-on-Sea AND who she’s going to be now that she’s not who she used to be. (And the name Gore-on-Sea is even more of a pun in this second outing than it was in the first!)

The first book was all about Nora’s mission and Nora’s purpose. She was too busy concealing her true identity and real motives from her fellow boarders at the Gulls Nest to spend too much of her energy worrying about what would happen to her afterwards.

Especially because there were a few points where she had to question whether she’d even HAVE an afterwards to worry about.

So she’s just a bit adrift at the beginning of her second investigation. That she knows she’s not going back is one decision. That she feels part of the little found family – as crazy as it is – at Gulls Nest, is one decision made. Paying for her food and lodging and incidentals is another. The monastery won’t and shouldn’t support her indefinitely.

But the real question for Nora Breen is who exactly Nora Breen, ex-nun, is going to be? That she’s faffing around about that question a bit isn’t a surprise under her circumstances. But she’s a bit muddled and the story muddles along a bit with her – at least until the murderer starts getting really inventive while hitting much too close to Nora’s own inner circle.

Which is where things get really muddled inside Nora’s own head and heart because she seems to be caught in a love triangle that she’s absolutely refusing to recognize even exists. (I’m a bit on the fence about its existence myself because this could go very badly, very weirdly, or both but it’s not there yet. In other words, this isn’t a series in which I expected a romance to occur, at least not for several more books. Not because Nora used to be a nun, but because she needs to figure herself out first and she’s self-aware enough to recognize that.)

The case itself is a bit bizarre and twice as twisted. Then again, so is the murderer. Part of what made the case so interesting is the way that it digs deep into the dark underbelly of the late war while displaying in both graphic and quiet details just how much the war was still with the entire country nearly a decade later. The scars to the landscape – especially London and the Blitz, were not yet fully healed or built over. Food rationing in the UK did not end until July of 1954, the summer just passed in this story. (This may go a long way towards explaining the terrible menus at Gulls Nest).

The scars that people carried – sometimes well and sometimes badly – make up a huge part of the motivations for the crimes. The murderer may have been a “bad seed” as was always claimed, but his experiences during and after the war didn’t help in anything but his choice of potential victims a decade later.

Once Nora stops letting herself be misdirected by assumptions – and there are plenty of those thanks to wartime confusion being mistake for facts – the story is off and running and exploding all around. And possibly not even over when it’s over, leaving readers perfectly teased for the next book in the series. May it be SOON!