A Body at the Grand Hotel by Benedict Brown

A Body at the Grand Hotel
by Benedict Brown

ISBN-13: 9781805088189
Kindle: 305 pages
Publisher: Storm Publishing
Released: November 12, 2024

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
When successful mystery novelist and fledgling private detective, Marius Quin, is invited to speak at the Mystery and Detection Society he jumps at the chance of a luxurious weekend away on the English Riviera. But arriving at Torquay’s Grand Hotel with his sleuthing partner Lady Bella Montague, there is the definite sense that all is not well.

When they wake the next morning to discover the body of a cantankerous local in the hotel pool, things go from bad to worse. But how can the duo catch a killer when every piece of evidence they uncover is contradicted by two more? Faced with a hostile police sergeant, evasive witnesses and a conspiracy to conceal the truth, Bella and Marius must call upon every last resource they possess to uncover the truth.


My Review:
A Body at the Grand Hotel is a mystery set in the 1920s in England. This book is the 4th in a series, but you can understand this story without having read the previous books. The official detective's main role seemed to be to tell everyone to cooperate with Marius and to arrest whodunit when revealed. Bella's main role seemed to be to help Marius with the suspect questioning as they got much more information together than when Marius tried to question people by himself. They questioned people and poked around for clues, so it's a clue-based mystery and whodunit is guessable. However, the clues could have been made to fit several people, so motive and even the assistant was easier to identify before the end than the possibly changeable whodunit.

The main characters were likable enough and interesting. The author clearly put a lot of time into researching the historical details (and the last 10% of the book explained more about these details). There were no sex scenes. There were only a couple uses of bad language. Overall, the mystery was fairly interesting, but the characters didn't engage me enough for me to read the rest of the series.