Not so comforting after all!

The ‘cosy mystery’ sub-genre of crime fiction tends to be the most dismissed by critics. It doesn’t have the grit of noir thrillers or the cunning plotting of locked-room mysteries. Critics tend to be sniffy because the writers who wrote these stories and the readers who read them have historically tended to be mostly female and the lead character investigating the mystery is too eccentric or too old to have any sex appeal.

Agatha Christie would be the most well-known name in the genre — she was scoffed at by book critics during her lifetime and even now as being too mass market to be taken seriously. In another medium, television, you had American drama series such as Columbo and Murder, She Wrote, which are considered the storytelling epitome of the cosy mystery and have remained beloved classics.

In Nina Simon’s debut novel Mother-Daughter Murder Night, a book that can definitely be classified as a cosy mystery, the mother and daughter in question — Beth and Jack — love watching murder movies and shows together. It’s a gruesome way to keep their bond strong, but it works for them. Soon, Beth’s mother Lana Rubicon joins them and they are solving an actual mystery together.

The relationship between Lana, a successful Los Angeles-based real estate developer, and her daughter Beth, a nurse in a long-term care facility in another part of California, is not a cordial or warm one when the story starts. Lana is diagnosed with cancer and has to recover post-surgery in her daughter’s house in Elkhorn Slough, a sleepy coastal town. Jack is a teenager who loves the ocean and has a part-time job taking tourists kayaking on the slough that gives the town its name.

One Sunday morning, Jack is taking out a group of tourists kayaking when they come across a body floating in the muck. The dead person is identified as Ricardo Cruz, a young naturalist working for a land trust in the area. The police question Jack and want to track down her slacker boss as Ricardo seems to have booked himself for a kayak trip the day his body was found. Lana, who is alarmed by the police’s interest in her granddaughter, gets involved in the investigation.

Soon enough there’s another death — a rich old landowner named Hal Rhoads passes away in the nursing home where Beth works. There’s a connection between Ricardo and the Rhoads family that comes to light and Lana is tracking down leads and questioning potential suspects even though weakened by the post-surgery effects and the medication she’s on. Jack also helps out her grandmother as she tries to hone in on the murderer.

While Simon creates interesting characters in Lana, Beth and Jack and vividly captures the environs of Elkhorn Slough on the page, the story itself is a bit of a letdown after a promising beginning. There are problems with pacing in the book which could have benefited from more incisive editing.

For long stretches of the story, you are at Lana’s side as she wanders around town talking to the same people and nothing much happens. You guess the identity of the murderer pretty quickly as well — since only two of the suspects seem to have a monetary stake that they want to protect. Even the police tend to act in a soporific manner, occasionally telling off Lana for her parallel investigation but don’t put too many obstacles in her way.

Some passages go deep into the laws related to land and property and conservation and given Simon’s own familiarity with the region in question (she lives in an off-grid community in the Santa Cruz mountains) this shouldn’t come as a surprise. But you do wonder if sometimes an info dump on California laws is really required in a novel like this when financial gain is a clear motivation for the crime at its heart.

While the parts of the book that deal with the fractious mother-and-daughter relationship between Lana and Beth do carry a certain emotional weight, the rest of the book seems to not quite connect with the reader in the same way. A cosy mystery usually offers a comforting escape (odd as it may seem when so many of these stories involve killing). But they also tend to be quick reads. While Mother-Daughter Murder Night does offer some escape to a unique landscape, its meandering pace makes it more of a slower read than necessary.