I liked this third book a lot more than the second. The books take place with no time passing between them, and in the second book especially we'd have references to characters in the first book without any back story explanation - so even though I'd read the first book a year ago, I'd completely forgotten who this character was. If the'd all been published simultaneously, less of a problem, but they haven't. This third book did a much better job of giving me tiny hints about who the side characters we see people talking about are.

I'm not a big mystery fan, so it would be unfair to say that the book bops along in seemingly random digressions and then bam in the last couple chapters Sherlock ties everything together with a narrative that I never stood any chance of having seen coming. The flashback exposition scenes at the end to fill in details felt cheap - we had characters hiding their true intentions from both the other characters in the book, and from us the reader. This is probably par for the course with mystery and I'm probably being grumpy.

Speaking of grumpy, I'm still not thrilled with the author's fat-shaming of Charlotte. Charlotte's adorable character traits include ridiculous frilly outfits and a love of sweets. I'm totally on board with these. We don't just see Charlotte loving sweets (or not, as her stress level increases during the book) but we read many other characters commenting on her weight and her love of sweets - often not in a kind way. I think it goes past "a woman would be fat shamed by society" into "the author is fat shaming her main character". The second book was the worst in this area IMO, but it's definitely still here and I really don't like to see it. This is probably just my hangup and other people would read it as cute. To me, it reads as the author being needlessly shitty to her MC, and I wonder if the author herself doesn't have some internalized fatphobia.

There's a little more of a romantic plotline in this book, but it's definitely not romance genre in the commonly accepted way.

Will I read the next book (I'm just assuming there is a next book)? This is getting tougher to say. I like the setting, I like the characters, I'm not a huge mystery fan and there are so many other good books to read. Then again the cover art on all of these are very engaging and I'm sure I'll be tricked into it by that.