Murder at Gulls Nest

by Jess Kidd ★★★★☆

It's 1954, and Nora Breen has spent the last 30 years in devotion to God, living her days in a the High Dallow convent in England. As nuns go, she wasn't as attached to her calling as some of her fellow sisters. But it was a life she chose for herself, and for the most part she was content. One source of contentment was a fellow sister, Frieda, a young novice who did not last long at the convent due to health reasons. The two women formed a bond, and when Frieda left, she asked Nora if she could write to her. Nora agreed, of course, and Frieda was true to her word, sending a letter every week...until the letters mysteriously stopped arriving.

Frieda had taken up residence at Gulls Nest, a boarding house in Gore-on-Sea in Kent, and her letters detailed the strange collection of people also living there. In her final letter, Frieda says, "I believe every one of us at Gulls Nest is concealing some kind of secret—I shall make it my business to find out and so I shall finally have something riveting to write to you, dear friend!".

Nora is concerned that Frieda's curiosity has gotten her in trouble, and so she makes the significant choice to leave the convent and investigate why the letters stopped. Nora, by nature, is predisposed to notice details and ask questions, attributes that didn't necessarily mix well with convent life. "Her inquisitive nature was judged to be disrespectful. Her cleverness the sin of pride. These were traits that found her scrubbing a far greater share of bathtubs than any other postulant. Now, out in the world, she can exercise these unfavorable traits. This thought fills Nora with a strange mix of relief and alarm."

Upon arriving at Gulls Nest, Nora finds that Frieda (whose place at the boarding house Nora is taking) had suddenly disappeared several weeks prior, leaving most of her belongings. The other residents are cagey about the details of Frieda's disappearance and uncomfortable when it is brought up—something clearly seems to be afoot. Besides Nora, there are eight adults and one child who live at Gulls Nest, either as boarders or staff. When one of them turns up dead, the reader is thrust into something akin to a game of Clue, where any of the residents could have been involved. Nora now has not one but two mysteries to solve.

Nora indefatigably pressures a local policeman, Inspector Rideout, to investigate Frieda's disappearance, and continues to insert herself into the murder investigation. When Rideout tries to gently dismiss Nora and asks she leave the detective work to the police, Nora is undeterred, and her perceptiveness starts to uncover clues that Rideout might have missed on his own. Nora even begins to fancy herself a burgeoning detective, perhaps a partner to the reluctant Rideout. “Breen, please," she says to him when he addresses her as Nora. "Call me by my surname like the detectives do in the books.”

Nora is brash and ahead of her time, a woman more capable than the men tasked with the job of investigating the mysteries but stuck living in a man's world. Nevertheless, she uses her natural determination and inquisitiveness to doggedly pursue an answer to the disappearance of her friend. There's a layered backstory with Nora that explains how a woman of her disposition ended up in a convent in the first place, and she's a well-rendered character with whom Kidd clearly intends to spend more time (the novel is being categorized as the first book in the "Nora Breen Investigates" series). The Gulls Nest mysteries, and the resulting reveals, are better than average, but fall short of the top offerings in the category. Like her previous novel Things in Jars (my #6 book of 2020), Kidd manages to keep what could be a serious story mostly light-hearted with a compelling cast of characters, but Murder at Gulls Nest doesn't match some of the quality of Jars. It's better than formulaic, but short of astounding. A solid start to what appears will be a series.