It’s not that Alice wants someone to die. It’s just that things were a lot more interesting when she and Iris were investigating a murder. Two months after Alice and Iris solved the murder of Brooke Donovan, Steve Anderson has become a semi-celebrity; Iris Adams and Cole Fielding are almost dating; and Alice Ogilvie is bored out of her brain. Reluctantly attending the school dance at Levy Castle, Alice sneaks away from the party to do some snooping while Iris gets close to Cole. But when she pushes open the door to what was once Charles Levy’s study, she quite literally falls onto her next case…

The Agatha’s’ was one of my best reads of 2023 so I pre-ordered the sequel, ‘The Night In Question‘ in the hopes of continuing the experience that I got from reading the first book. 

By the time I was twenty-five per cent through the book, I realised that I wasn’t going to get the exceptional read that I was looking for.

The writing and the narration are still good. As before, the carefully crafted differentiation between the voices, thought processes and expectations of Iris and Alice make the book richer.

So why did I set it aside?

The basic premise of the book didn’t grab me. Maybe it’s just me but the whole spooky castle from which a 1940s movie star fell to her death felt too contrived. It put me at a distance from the young people in the present-day timeline.

I also bumped into the typical second-book problems: not enough was new and what was familiar had changed into something less exciting. In the first book, the relationship between Alice and Iris was emerging and was often at risk. In this book they’re friends, (well mostly) and that took the edge off things.

I also didn’t like that the idiot detective from the first book remains as stupid and intractable as ever. For me, this turned him into a comic book character. 

Perhaps I’ve become a less patient reader this year, standing as I am in the shadow of a mountain of books that I want to read but while I’m sure that if I’d finished the book I’d have been giving it a ‘perfectly satisfactory‘ three-star rating, I didn’t want to spend the hours it was going to take to get there.