A Spoonful of Murder

By J. M. Hall

What it’s about:

Once a week, three retired school teachers have their ‘coffee o’clock’ sessions at the Thirsk Garden Centre café.
 
But one fateful Thursday morning, they bump into their ex-colleague, Topsy, during their weekly coffee and catch-up. By the next Thursday, Topsy’s dead.
 
The last thing Liz, Thelma and Pat imagined was that they would become embroiled in a murder.
 
But they know there’s more to Topsy’s death than meets the eye – and it’s down to them to prove it…

What I think:

I have really enjoyed recent cosy murder mysteries featuring older people such as The Thursday Murder Club and The Marlow Murder Club and thought this might be similar.

There are a lot of characters in this book. Liz Thelma and Pat each have their own lives and families as well as the victim, her family and their friends. There are a lot of different elements to the mystery and it takes a while to put them all together.

Because of this the pace was a bit slow for me. And while the old characters are experiences memory loss and trying to stave off the onset of dementia, I found the repetition a little tiresome although it was sin keeping with the characters.

The book certainly highlights how vulnerable some of the elderly can be to unscrupulous tradesman and fraud.

Overall this was a decent enough mystery that I’m sure lots of readers will love.

Thank you to Netgalley for the gifted digital copy of A Spoonful Of Murder