After a decades-long stint in prison, former serial killer Carol is looking to kick back and relax in her new retirement home...until a fellow resident drops dead and Carol has to prove she actually didn't do it this time....
Carol is delighted to be leaving her tiny prison cell behind to take her place in a luxury retirement home. She's hoping her past as a serial killer won't come to light so she can make a few friends and find some murder-free hobbies. But it's not long before a fellow resident—who happens to be a former police commissioner—drops dead, and Carol's true identity is leaked—making catching up over daily activities of bingo and baking rather awkward.
Just her luck, Carol soon realizes that the victim wasn't the only former law enforcement officer at Sheldon Oaks—it's filled to the brim with former cops, barristers, and government representatives, her newfound friends included. And everyone thinks Carol's guilt is a no-brainer, but she is ready to prove them dead wrong...without killing anyone, for once.

My Review:

There’s an old saying that goes, “Set a thief to catch a thief” – in other words, that the best way to catch or at least outsmart a criminal is to hire someone exactly like them to catch them out. If the idea sounds familiar it’s because that’s exactly what institutions involved with cybersecurity do, they hire either former hackers or “white hat” hackers to protect them from, well, hacking.

But there’s an assumption built into that old saying, one that works perfectly with that cybersecurity application. It assumes that whoever is doing that ‘setting’ wants to either catch or stop the actual person doing the thieving (or hacking) or killing because they need to prevent any further such nefarious activity.

That’s not what kicks off this story. The police, in the person of DCI Bob Beattie, don’t want to catch the guilty party in former police commissioner Desmond Crisp’s murder at the Sheldon Oaks Retirement Community. Because Beattie already has a perfectly plausible murderer halfway into the frame before the investigation even begins.

A convicted serial killer has just moved into Sheldon Oaks. Everyone already believes that Carol Quinn did it. The other residents of Sheldon Oaks believed she was going to murder someone long before it happened. DCI Beattie is happy to let the elderly residents feel justified in their earlier suspicions.

Even though plenty of the residents are either retired criminals, retired investigators, or both. And there are plenty of people with much better motives than Carol for murdering Crisp. Who was, after all, known in his day as being a very powerful and very bent copper indeed. A fact that the Met would prefer no one raked up and roasted over the coals of scandal and corruption now that the man is dead.

But Carol knows she didn’t do it. Not that she hasn’t been tempted to veer off the straight and narrow, but dreaming of murdering someone isn’t a crime unless you actually do the deed. Which Carol didn’t. She also knows that she has the best chance of figuring out who did kill Desmond before she ends up back in the prison where she just finished serving out her sentence.

The police may not be willing to set a killer to catch the killer, but Carol is more than willing to change from killer to investigator to keep from being railroaded to a justice that this time she does not deserve.

Escape Rating B: I have mixed feelings about this one. So many mixed feelings. But before I get into my mixed feelings about the story, I have to say that I have none whatsoever about the audio version I listened to. Narrator Joan Walker did an excellent job making the many voices of the large cast of characters sound distinct and distinctly recognizable from each other. She also made an especially good Carol Quinn, who was realistic, pragmatic, wry, self-deprecating and self-aware of exactly who she was and how she got herself into the fix she is currently in.

My mixed feelings, however, are all about the story itself. I liked Carol quite a bit. She represents all of our frustrations with life and the people around us. She just acts, not so much on the frustrations, but on the people who get away with being, well, assholes – at least until Carol makes them stop. That she murders people for getting on her nerves – or for kicking their dogs – is a bit over the top but the way that Carol tells her story we still get where she’s coming from.

Just as we get her desire to make friends, live a normal life, and stay out of prison. She’s paid her debt to society, and she doesn’t plan to kill again. Which is not, initially, as much of a character reference as it could be, as she fully admits she occasionally feels the urge. She just isn’t intending to act on it. And doesn’t, not even when the opportunity presents itself. Which it does.

We do get enough inside Carol’s head – and for that matter her heart – to understand just how much she values the opportunity to finally have some real friends, and how desperate she is to keep those friends and keep herself out of prison. Which does explain the way the story ends.

What drove me a bit out of the story was the way that the investigation was conducted. I tend to read mysteries, even cozy mysteries, to read about competence. Someone knows what they’re doing – even if it’s not the police as it’s definitely not in this instance.

But the official investigation in this one was exceedingly slapdash, even by the looser standards of a cozy. The police didn’t even nod in the direction of checking motives, following the money, documenting the crime scene, or much of anything else. I started thinking about the corruption angle, and it wasn’t that either. Well it was, but on a much smaller scale and in a very different way than I was thinking. And might have made a bit more sense – or made a much bigger story. (C’est la reading vie.)

The obvious lampshading of other ‘murder club’ stories like The Thursday Murder Club and The Marlow Murder Club was highlighted so brightly that it pushed the story more than a bit over the top. (Not that both of those plus the Ernest Cunningham series (Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone) and especially An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good, are not excellent readalikes.

I was also left with mixed feelings because the ending shouldn’t have been the ending. I’m not referring to the whodunit resolution, because that made as much sense as any cozy mystery. But the fallout from that resolution, which sets up the next book in the series. Which will be I’m Not the Only Murderer at This Wedding, coming next February. Which tells you some of how this one ends but not the salient bit, which would be a terrible spoiler.

A review for a mystery that ends with a cliffhanger! Who would have thought?