Murder Most Actual is a light-hearted, cosy mystery that follows married couple Liza and Hanna, who visit a lavish Scottish hotel to rekindle their relationship and become trapped in a snowstorm and ringed into solving a murder of potentially international intrigue. I loved that our two main characters were already well-established with each other instead of meeting for the first time, but I felt like the rest of the story needed some streamlining.

I don’t want to be incredibly critical of this book because there were parts that I enjoyed. I thought using Cluedo-style characters in this locked-room mystery was intriguing and worked well in a tongue-in-cheek way. I was really invested when the first murder happened and was keen to get caught up in the whodunnit, as I haven’t read anything like that before.

However, unfortunately, I found the mystery to be very dull. Characters kept on being murdered, but no one seemed like they were doing anything about it. Our main character and investigator, Liza, continuously repeated herself but never made any actual conclusions. I understand that murders in IRL are pretty uninteresting and boring, and that’s true, but that’s not very satisfying for a fictional murder mystery book.

I was expecting Knives Out in book form, and this isn’t that sort of book. I feel like the author needed to choose what to focus on - Liza and Hanna’s marriage or the increasing murders happening around them as doing both meant each storyline felt tenuous and thinly explored. But at the same time, the book was too long, and the repetition of dialogue and plot resulted in both becoming pretty dull, pretty quickly. Hall’s style of witty, sarcastic writing worked so well for Boyfriend Material, but it didn’t have the same effect on me here, which was disappointing.

Rating: 3/5

Trigger Warnings: blood, death, gore, gun violence, homophobia, murder, suicide, sexism violence

Engaging as a solvable mystery that readers can play along with, but also a heartwarming tale where life is messy but that doesn't mean it's not worth loving the people in your life.

Alexis Hall came for capitalism in the very first chapter, so this cozy mystery was magnificent from the start. As if we would expect anything less. Our intrepid investigators are a married couple desperately in need of therapy: true crime podcaster Liza and finance fancy human Hanna. It meets the cozy definition with ease, holing up in a castle hotel on a stormy weekend with quite a cast of characters on hand.

The story positively thrives on the comical exactitude of squeezing a lady in a peacock shawl, a professor in plum, a vicar in green, a colonel in a mustard tie, and our investigators around one dinner table with a chef by the name of White in the kitchen. The Clue-esque delights continue with a seductress in a scarlet 1940s-style dress who goes by "Ruby" and knows secrets pertaining to the murder. There's also a private detective with delusions of Poirot who is guilty of referring to himself in the third person and throwing around unnecessary French phrases, so consider me DEAD on arrival. The characters take themselves quite seriously and some of their antics made me laugh so hard, I genuinely snorted and/or cried. There are also some fun layout Easter eggs, so expect to find the billiard room adjacent to the library and a certain secret passage off the conservatory.

This was a wacky, fun mystery with a litany of great one-liners (all diligently highlighted by yours truly) and a pleasant degree of self-awareness. Between Liza's itch of curiosity to solve the murder(s) and Hanna's insistence on not being too gruesomely disrespectful or enthusiastically reckless, the two make a great team. It's one of the best cozies I've had the pleasure of reading, and I highly recommend it. My thanks to Kobo and Valentine PR for my copy to read and review.