A great read. I enjoyed reading it and it has a great plot and characters. I also look forward to more books from the author.

New York in the early 1900's was the where the story was set.
World War 1 was taking place in Europe and a young female reporter was trying to live her dream.
Kitty Weeks has a job writing for the ladies page. Covering a society page and incident occurs and Kitty's life takes on a new direction.
I really enjoyed how the story unfolds: the history, the prejudices against women. The characters were realistic and likeable.
I'd love to read further books with these characters in.

I liked this entertaining and engaging historical mystery.
It's well researched, well written and with likable characters.
The historical background is fascinating and it was interesting to read about women position in the 10s of the last century.
The mystery is fascinating and it was great to learn about some historical facts I didn't know before.
I look forward to reading other books in this series.
Highly recommended!
Many thanks to Canelo and Netgalley for this ARC

Anyone who knows me knows I love a cosy mystery. If they know me really well, they might know that the things I like most are complex, engaging characters, a believable setting and a good plot. In this respect, Rhada Vatsal’s A Front Page Affair, partly delivers.

Kitty (real name Capability) Weeks is a New York socialite in the early months of the First World War. Europe is getting deeper into conflagration and America is poised on the edge of war. Kitty, an aspiring journalist with the society pages of a New York newspaper, is sent to cover a party at an uptown country club, only to find herself witness to murder — and of course, she’s determined to track the killer down.

I very much wanted to like this book, and it does have a lot going for it. It has a clever setting and fictional events are cleverly woven in with actual historical ones. The plot was clever, focussing on the diplomatic manoeuvrings around America’s potential entry into the war, and there were twists and turns aplenty, although, if I’m honest, some of them stretched my credibility a little bit too far (no spoilers, but surely no FBI agents would allow a member of the public along on a mission to intercept a killer just because she happened to be interested in the case).

So far, so good, but the element of the book the rather disappointed me was the characterisation. For me, any book has to be driven by the characters. I want to feel engaged by them. I want to care about them. In this book, I didn’t, and the end result was that I felt the whole thing was rather superficial. Characters came and went. There was no depth to them, no complications. Kitty herself was a spoiled rich girl and never really stopped to think about anything, except in passing. The minor characters, too, weren’t clearly drawn in terms of character (describing someone’s external appearance is only part of it) and, for example, all the FBI agents tended to merge into one in my head as I read.

I realise I’m being fussy, here, and other people may look for different things from a book. It’s not a bad book, by any means, but just one that didn’t give me what I’m looking for from a cosy novel. If you want a pacy, light read with a few twists and lot of fascinating (real-life) background about New York in 1915, then this is definitely your book, even if it wasn’t mine.

Thanks to Canelo books and Netgalley for a copy of this book in return for an honest review.