The Expectant Detectives

• Author: Kat Ailes
• Genre: Cozy Mystery
• Publication Date: January 9, 2024
• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Series: The Expectant Detectives #1

Thank you to NetGalley and Minotaur Books for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Can they solve the mother of all murders?

For Alice and her partner Joe, moving to the sleepy village of Penton is a chance to embrace country life and prepare for the birth of their first child. He can take up woodwork; maybe she’ll learn to make jam? But the rural idyll they’d hoped for doesn’t quite pan out when a dead body is discovered at their local prenatal class, and they find themselves suspects in a murder investigation.

With a cloud of suspicion hanging over the heads of the whole group, Alice and her new-found pregnant friends set out to solve the mystery and clear their names, with the help of her troublesome dog, Helen. However, there are more secrets and tensions in the heart of Penton than first meet the eye. Between the discovery of a shady commune up in the woods, the unearthing of a mysterious death years earlier, and the near-tragic poisoning of Helen, Alice is soon in way over her head.

I do love a good cozy mystery, and this seemed like such a cool spin on the basic premise. For the most part, I read this via ebook, but also attempted to read some of it in audiobook version. Kitty Kelly was the narrator, and she’s got a heavy accent that I struggled with, so I went back to the ebook version.

While this book sounded like it would hit all the right spots to make it a really great read, I ended up DNFing it at 53%. There were a few things that contributed to this being a DNF for me. The biggest one is that I never really found myself connecting with the story or the characters. It’s hard to read an entire book when you aren’t invested in anything about it, and once I found myself putting it down and not wanting to pick it back up, I knew it was time to DNF. 

Other things that came up were minor, but they obviously were noticeable. The first one was the way that the main character, who is the only POV character, speaks about her pregnant body and compares it with other bodies. I don’t know if that technically counts as fatphobia, but if not, it’s fatphobia-adjacent. She constantly talks about waddling and being a blimp, and it was uncomfortable. There’s also a scene where a side character gives birth when there are no trained professionals (or EMTs, apparently) available, and this first-time mom just has a baby that pops out with no problems after about 5 minutes of labor. 

Despite reading more than half of the book, I didn’t have any problem walking away from the rest of the story. It wasn’t even important to me to find out who was behind the murder. But this is just my own personal opinion, and the book has plenty of 4 and 5 star reviews, so take it with a grain of salt and form your own opinions!

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