Three stars, three and a half for engagement.

Aside from the need to suspend disbelief regarding everything from how & why our heroine wasn’t busted while sleuthing, how she lived on cigarettes and hardly any food, to how neatly she put the pieces together, to the use of “carriage return” for “enter” (1998 wasn’t THAT long ago) on a computer, we’d guess that one’s response to this story may well hinge on one’s experience and/or feelings regarding the college environment.

To us it mostly felt rather cookie-cutter and shallow. (If you think that was a gratuitous use of “rather,” brace yourself for the prevalence of “quite” in the novel.) Granted, it’s been decades since we’ve been an undergrad, but we can’t imagine such casual classroom operation, not just on one occasion but regularly. There was absolutely no sense of academic rigor. Characters seemed mostly almost caricatures, like paper doll people. Don’t even get us started on Lily’s smoking; likely it was a facet of some light modern version of a hard-boiled detective trope, but it felt ridiculous. Do so many people still smoke in the South West of England? And everywhere! At restaurants, in the academic buildings, wherever.

We did like Lily’s family, especially her Mum, her younger brother Nat, and her mom’s friend Sue, but not enough to subject ourselves to any additional books in this series.

In some ways, though, the writer can tell a story. It was often difficult to put the book down, even with our various dissatisfactions.

The cover blurb from BBC Radio 4: “Twin Peaks condensed into book form” is probably telling, but we never watched “Twin Peaks.”