So yes the main character is autistic so I immediately grabbed this one.

The author made it so the autistic character gets bullied immediately.

I was sincerely hoping for a book with representation that didn’t have to do with the bullying and societal conflicts disabled people face and would instead be about her being a cool protagonist. I simply could not read this without immediately feeling angry. I wanted a fun cozy mystery.

This is not the book for me.

Thank you for allowing me to sample this book. I am leaving honest feedback voluntarily.

A great quick read, with an interesting story and characters. It shows the importance of not judging anyone by whatever limits you may think they have. Definitely would recommend to crime fans

Not a bad read. Well written but not too exciting. Some places it was very slow paced with repeated descriptions of emotions and similar situations .

When I first saw and read about "A Special Interest In Murder," I was incredibly excited. A cozy mystery with an autistic protagonist written by an autistic author? As a neurospicy cozy mystery reader: Hell to the yes. Unfortunately, the follow-through left quite a bit to be desired.

We meet Ada, fresh off a divorce where she lost the cosmetics company she founded. Her ex, who is incredibly bigoted against autistic people, sends her a blog post about the death of an autistic girl at a boarding school for autistic children. Ada finds some things she thinks are off about the photo, discovers there hasn’t been any other write up about this death, and decides to contact the FBI. Enter a guy she knew in high school: Henry. He’s now an FBI agent, who decides to follow up on Ada’s tip and investigate the murder, with Ada’s help.

This is an incredibly interesting mystery with a lot of twists and turns. And the tight POV certainly gives the setting of a boarding school for autistic kids a different ambiance than we’d have seen from Henry. Ada’s POV is used to great effect when it comes to this.

The first big strain on my suspension of disbelief came when Henry took on this case. There is no reason the FBI would have jurisdiction on the murder of a child at a boarding school—that would fall firmly on the local police. At multiple points, I almost stopped reading this book based entirely on the way everything around the FBI’s taking the case and Ada’s consultation is handled. The only reason I finished it is because I agreed to ARC it. I will say that there is an explanation for some of this in the end. My opinion is that the explanation is not a good one. It still makes very little sense, and it doesn’t change the fact that some of these plot holes are gaping, but for anyone who also wants to throw the book based entirely on this setup, you do get an explanation approximately 90% of the way through.

Next, we have Ada. Just… Ada. I’m the first person who will argue that female characters don’t need to be likable. But Ada is a mess. She comes across as robotic, at best. At worst, she is the literary version of Sheldon Cooper.

There is a lot of telling and not a lot of showing when it comes to the positive traits of Ada’s character. The biggest instance of this is with Ada’s ability to care about anyone else: We’re told repeatedly that she’s empathetic—Henry, at one point, says, “Not many people have your level of empathy”—but we never actually see evidence of this empathy. Instead, we get a person whose response to the sobs of a grieving mother is three paragraphs bemoaning how much sensory overload it’s causing. Who then follows this up by accusing the grieving parents of being one-and-done because they hated the idea that they could have another autistic child. No one in the room (aside from the parents) seems to take any issue with this.

Ada spends pages bitching about Henry asking questions to ensure she’s comfortable and that her needs are met. Complaining about his intuitive judgements. Accusing him of lying, manipulating, and being biased against autistic people, with absolutely no evidence. She wishes he’d tell her she did a good job with something, and then when he does, she gets upset because it isn’t in the specific wording she’d like. Henry, my man, you deserve better than Ada.

The highlight of the book for me was meeting all the various staff at the school, learning the ways their lives had been touched by autistic people, and hearing the different reasons those interactions had given them for choosing to work in the field of autistic education. We see a wide variety, from people who have autistic children in their lives, to those with autistic siblings. The scenes where we got to see them interact with the children at the school were great.

I wish I could say that I know people who would enjoy this book, or that I could think of a target audience that would, but I can’t. The allistic cozy mystery fans I know would be incredibly put off by the massive plot holes in the set up, and the autistic ones would be genuinely upset by the stereotypical representation offered by Ada. More showing and less telling with Ada’s traits would go a long way in turning this book from a Barely Finished to a 3.5-4 Star read, and something I’d be able to recommend.

I'm giving this book a 3/5 star rating because I do not know how to rate my feelings about it. (And since 3/5 is smack in the middle, that feels fair and logical.)

So, this story follows a neuro-divergent detective with an obnoxious ex. And she has to solve a murder alongside the FBI. She used to be a cosmetics industry billionaire (yes, that career change was equally as confusing to me too).

This had so much potential to be fun, but the writing and characterization was not it for me.

I just didn't love the writing style, it was too simplistic in an almost choppy way. Everything was stated so plainly, there was absolutely no character to the writing itself (if that makes sense). I'm not asking every author to have the most flowery writing, that can get annoying too, but having such stagnant sentences really feels so elementary and strange.

My big problem with this book though, the characterization! You will know that this detective main character is neuro-divergent every other sentence. There's nothing wrong with being neuro-divergent, obviously, I am neuro-divergent in like half a dozen different ways. So I get it. But when I am going through life, I'm not looking at people and going "that's not very OCD of them" or "there's no way they're anxious because why are they doing that thing that way." That is not how neuro-divergent people think. But that is how this main character thinks. She thinks people are not autistic because they are not autistic in the exact same way she is...fun fact: every single person is an individual, and therefore, different. Not every single person with the same condition is identical. That is common sense, I fear.

I did some research and the author is autistic, but this reads as if she is not and almost making fun of it? Or talking about it the way people who don't know anything about it do? It was so weird. I'm not trying to invalidate how she moves through the world with her own brain, but she's kind of pushing that way of thinking onto others and it just rubs me the wrong way. It was kind of offensive at times for me.

I also found the mystery and pacing of the story itself to be rather slow. Some people like a slower mystery, I like a much faster paced story. Keep me on the edge of my seat. I just couldn't get into this story (or its characters).

This just wasn't for me. Sorry. It was SUPER short though, I'm sure you could finish it in a single sitting if you wanted to!

Thanks to NetGalley for the e-ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review! My Goodreads review is up and my TikTok (Zoe_Lipman) review will be up at the end of the month with my monthly reading wrap-up.

The book features an autistic amateur detective. Out of the blue our autistic detective's ex sends her a blog about one autistic child killing another - just to hurt her feelings apparently. The death is reportedly accidental but our hero thinks differently. This sets the story in motion.

The author is an adult-diagnosed autistic which lends credibility to the descriptions and viewpoint of our detective. However, in her enthusiasm to introduce us to the world of autism the author presses too hard and piles on every fact and misunderstanding related to autism. It's just too much too soon. It was a fire hose of information. I don't doubt the author, it's just the details of an autistic experience take some time to understand. The agenda is strong in this one.

Having said that, this is a readable story of a mysterious death and a primer on the experience of autism. But there isn't much action or character development and the pacing is slow snd repetitive.

It is also low-key depressing. The protagonist has such a low view of the world. She finds fault everywhere. Is there no joy in her life? Is everyone else broken? Others try to help. Try to understand. Overall, the writing and the characters are inconsistent and sometimes contradictory and confusing. I got a bit tired of the main character stereotyping neurotypical people. Especially after trying so hard not to be stereotyped herself.

And the ex-husband complicates the story unnecessarily. I don't understand his importance. He's not really relevant. There are a lot of different ways the news story that sets the wheels in motion could have gotten to our hero. I don't understand the antagonism of the ex-husband towards our detective. It's vitriolic to an extreme. The author seems to use the character as the enemy of the autistic population at large. But they were married at one time. And she was autistic at the time he married her. Little is explained.

Without the veneer of mystery I'd likely have stopped reading. There are a lot of contractions and things that simply aren't realistic. At every stage I wondered how much of the book was actually describing the author's own experiences. I couldn't shake the feeling that the author was a character between the lines.