Title: Death Under a Little Sky (Goodreads link)
Author: Stig Abell
Genre: Fiction
Published: April 2023
My Rating: 2 on 5
I have no recollection where I found this book or who recommended it, but I found this book on my want-to-read list on Goodreads. As I am in a murder mystery phase right now, I picked up this book with no second thoughts.
Jake Jackson is very different from your typical detective. For one, he is running away from his successful detective life and doesn’t want to be involved in anything related to detective work. He is also running away from his personal life as his marriage has ended. His uncle has left Jake a little house called Little Sky in the middle nowhere and Jake laps up this opportunity to escape from his disappointing life. Jake moves to Little Sky and starts his new life but soon runs into Livia, the veterinarian, and finds himself getting attracted to her. A harmless game in the village turns serious when Jake finds a bag of human bones. The police get involved and appoint Jake as their unofficial partner to investigate the case on behalf of them. The plot thickens as Jake unearths drugs and shady characters. The book has to naturally end with Jake figuring out who the culprit is and the complicated love story of Jake-Livia is going in the background.
The book started with a lot of promise – the atypical protagonist, the lovely setting of Little Sky and the ideal world of Jake with only books for company. However, the book loses its focus and the writing gets boring at times. The main character remains shallow and lacks the depth needed to relate to him. Same goes for the other characters – one sided and hard to relate to. I was itching for Sara’s character to develop as the central character binding all the locals together, but it never happened.
The biggest disappointment for me was the reveal. For a murder mystery book to work, the readers should have an “aha” moment where they had known the clues all along but needed the detective to reveal the culprit only to say to themselves “how did I miss that”. In this book, Jake figures out who did it by some random clue in some random report written by some random character.
If a good mystery is what you seek, there are many good ones out there.
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