3 Stars from me.

This is book eight of the series Antiques and Collectibles Mysteries.

Molly Appleby is a journalist for Collector’s Weekly, a magazine reporting on antiques and related subjects. On the side she also helps local law enforcement solve crimes relating to antiques. Molly attended a ball with her husband, Matt, when the brother-in-law of the owner of the home fell out of a window to his death. Maxim, son of Curtis Cobb, the man who died, asked Molly to investigate his father’s death. The police soon start to view the death as a homicide and Molly teams up with Detective Lombardi once again.

What follows are Molly’s inquiries into a family riddled with scandal, disappointments, secrets, and disharmony. As Molly digs deeper into the doings of the Gordon family, all sorts of skeletons make their appearance.

All the characters potentially involved in the murder, are peculiar in their own way. We have Natasha Gordon – the head of the family, Felix – still hopelessly in love with Natasha’s dead sister, Galena, who was married to Curtis, and Peggy – Felix’s mother who works for the Gordon family. They all came under suspicion at some point in time. And thrown into the mix was a very annoying and arrogant private investigator.

Molly is a solid, reliable character. She has some excellent theories about the case and good ideas on how to test those theories. She is careful, and never rushed into anything. The story is full of twists and turns and things become a lot more tense towards the end. The ending was a surprise, but I admit I did have my suspicions by the time everything was revealed. The investigation was very level-headed, but it still generated a certain degree of excitement.

I wasn’t completely hooked here, but enough that I wanted to see it through to the end.

I received an advanced copy of the book from Netgalley to review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Was I hooked by this book? Parts of it, yes, it did alright.

Genre: Mystery