Faber & Faber| 11 Mar. 2025| 335 pages| review copy| e-book| 4*

Summary from the publishers’ website:

The first in a sparkling new 1950s seaside mystery series, featuring sharp-eyed former nun Nora Breen.

After thirty years in a convent, Nora Breen has thrown off her habit and set her sights on the seaside town of Gore-on-Sea. Why there? Why now? Instinct tells her it’s better not to reveal her reasons straight away. She takes a room at Gulls Nest guest house and settles in to watch and listen.

Somewhere in the north, a religious community meets for Vespers. Here on the southeast coast, Nora Breen prepares for braised liver and a dining room full of strangers.

Over disappointing – and sometimes downright inedible – dinners, Nora realises that she was right to keep quiet: her fellow lodgers are hiding something. At long last, she has found an outlet for her powers of observation and, well, nosiness: there is a mystery to solve, and she is the only person for the job.

My thoughts:

This is the first one of Jess Kidd’s books that I’ve read and I didn’t know what to expect. I enjoyed it. It’s quirky with some odd characters. At times it feels like a cosy crime mystery, but it’s also rather dark and foreboding, whereas at other times there’s some humour and also a hint of a romance. The setting is good in a fictional 1950s British seaside town.

It’s the mystery and the characters (there a lot) that stand out the most in my mind. Nora, the main character, is a no-nonsense person, who has just left a convent after 30 years, where she worked as a nurse. She went to the same guest house at Gore-on-Sea to find her friend, Frieda, a novice who had previously left the same convent due to ill health. Frieda had been writing to her weekly, but Nora hadn’t heard from her for some time and knew something was very wrong.

There are some very strange people. Among these people the ones who stood out for me are Nora, who is adjusting to life outside the outside world, whilst trying not to draw attention to herself. Dinah, who is eight years old, is the daughter of Helena, the owner of Gulls Nest, and is a very strange child. Nora first met Dinah hanging upside down from a curtain rail. Sometimes she hides in a small cupboard and doesn’t speak to anyone, living in a world of her own. Then there is old Professor Poppy, a Punch and Judy man with his puppets, and the mysterious Karel Jezek, who follows the young married couple Stella and Teddy. Teddy is suspicious of Karel, suspecting that something is going on between him and Stella.

Frieda had told Nora that she believed all the people at Gulls Nest were concealing some kind of secret. And indeed they were as Nora finds out. Life at Gulls Nest is tense, as all the residents’ secrets and past lives bubble away under the surface. Matters come to the boil as some of them die, or are they murdered? Nora helps Detective Inspector Rideout of the local police as he investigates the deaths as well as Frieda’s disappearance.

Overall I loved this book, crime fiction that is really in a category all of its own, that kept me wondering what was going on all the way to the end.

Jess Kidd was brought up in London as part of a large family from county Mayo and has been praised for her unique fictional voice. Her debut, Himself, was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards in 2016, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2017 and longlisted for the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger 2017. Jess won the 2016 Costa Short Story Award. Her second novel, The Hoarder, also titled Mr. Flood’s Last Resort (U.S.), was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2019 and longlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. Both books were BBC Radio 2 Book Club Picks. Her third book, the Victorian detective tale Things in Jars, has been released to critical acclaim. Jess’s work has been described as ‘Gabriel García Márquez meets The Pogues.’

Jess’s first book for children, Everyday Magic, was published in April 2021. Jess’s fourth novel for adults, The Night Ship, was released in August 2022. Murder at Gulls Nest, the first in the Nora Breen Investigates series will publish in Spring 2025. Jess is currently developing her own original TV projects with leading UK and international TV producers. (Copied from the C & W, a London-based literary agency’s website)

Many thanks to the publishers for a review copy via NetGalley.