The Expectant Detectives by Kat Ailes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
**3.5-stars rounded up**
The Expectant Detectives is a new style of Cozy Mystery that I have certainly never read before. I found it to be charming and a heck of a lot of fun; pure enjoyment.
I love Cozy Mysteries that feature an MC and their friend group trying to solve a local mystery. A few favorites, to be noted for example, from recent years would be The Thursday Murder Club, Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers and The Marlow Murder Club.
All three of these books have one important thing in common, the MCs are older than we would typically find in the Mystery genre. These older, dare we call them elderly, characters are quirky, fun and provide a bit of a different perspective than the norm.
In The Expectant Detectives, Kat Ailes uses a very similar set-up to other Cozies, but her intrepid group of amateur sleuths are pregnant women, not elderly individuals.
In this story, we meet and follow, Alice. She and her boyfriend, Joe, are expecting their first child. Although not planned, they’re both excited about the pregnancy and looking forward to the next steps in their relationship.
Thinking their city-located flat will be too small for their growing family, they decide to move to the sleepy village of Penton. They just feel like it would be a more desirable place to raise a child. Safer and all that…
That is until a dead body is discovered at a prenatal class they have joined. They can’t believe it. This is not what they thought village life would be like.
Now everyone in attendance at the class is a suspect, including Alice and Joe.
Together with a few of the other pregnant women, Alice begins looking into the murder herself. She needs to clear their names before this baby arrives.
Side note, Alice has a glorious dog, Helen, who could easily turn out to be my favorite character of the year. I just adored her and the joy she brought to the narrative.
I was really entertained by this story. The audiobook was well done, the narration so on-point with the humor that it had me laughing out loud numerous times.
I thought Ailes set-up for this story was creative and truly unlike anything I’ve read before. Alice has a dry, witty sense of humor that worked well for me. She tells it like it is. She’s pretty blunt about her pregnancy and the way it is changing/affecting her body.
I also liked that it wasn’t just Alice that was pregnant, she had her new friends to share the experience with, as well as to help her do some first-rate investigating.
For me, I wouldn’t say the initial murder was totally compelling. It didn’t even make sense to me at first how they were so confident it was a murder, like it almost felt like it could have been an accident or something.
Nevertheless, I was willing to go on that journey with the characters because I was enjoying them so much. After a while, the more the ladies dug in, the more secrets and intrigue they revealed, then I was hooked.
Overall, this is a fantastic debut Mystery. It had just the right amount of humor and fun, mixed in with the actual mystery. I think the longer this series goes on, the more attached that I’m going to get to these characters and this village as well.
Thank you so much to the publisher, Macmillan Audio, for providing me with a copy to read and review. I’m definitely looking forward to more from Kat Ailes!