I was really excited to receive an ARC of this book: family drama set in Muskoka, yes please! While it started off well with Lady V and her love of Golden Retrievers (another win for me), it quickly deteriorated for this reader. It’s actively annoying me to the point where I have to stop reading. DNF @ 26%.

👎 No strong sense of time or place: I requested because I love Muskoka and was keen to spend time there in fiction, but the sense of place was so under-utilized this could’ve been set anywhere. Naming the hotel Highclere (Downton Abbey’s IRL namesake) was a confusing choice. The book often felt more British than Canadian. Also, more historic than modern?!

👎 The characters were boring, pretentious, and awful: the MMC Mason is profoundly annoying and immature. While I liked Cici more, I really struggled to empathize or care about these entitled middle-aged children squabbling about an inheritance. It didn’t feel very high stakes to me and I wasn’t invested in the story. It felt more like a personal diary where the perceived injustice doesn’t translate to the real world. I kinda hoped the horrid family would lose out.

👎 I found the writing and storytelling distractingly poor:
• Very unnatural dialogue: sometimes characters are overly verbose or formal using awkward turns of phrase that sound so jarring as speech; other times, it’s just over-the-top embarrassing. At any rate, people don’t talk like this. It was also bizarre how old-fashioned and outdated the English characters' dialogue and communications were.
• There wasn’t a change of tone across mediums: speech, emails, texts, narrative all sounded the same. The emails were basically just a vehicle for info-dumps.
• Extraneous and laboured scenes that don’t add anything except noise. Scenes ideally would enrich characterization or move the plot forward; there were many here that did neither (two pages talking about vaginas?). Tighter, more intentional writing may have improved the slow pace and kept the story front and centre.
• Writing felt very clunky with stilted language, poor phrasing, and lack of coherence. Could benefit from more robust editing and consistency checking (for example: they call the Met Police at least three different names; Canadian characters likely wouldn't put those weird Xs in texts, that’s an English thing).
• The humour was sarcastic and juvenile: I got the impression the author thought they were hilarious but none of it landed for me, it was just annoying.
• There’s a lot of repetition and reintroduction of characters, as if the author can’t trust the readers to remember them.

I was so disappointed this didn’t work for me. 🤷‍♀️

This was a strong start to the Highclere Inn & Carriage House Mysteries series, it had that element that I was looking for from the description. It was everything that I was hoping for and enjoyed from the genre. I was invested in what Josh Hellyer wrote and was excited to read more in this series.

Josh Hellyer's A Box of Frogs is a fun, if sometimes slightly flawed, mystery romp.

Let me start with the good stuff...

The engaging leads, Mason and Cici, draw the reader into their investigation of the family patriarch’s suspicious death and the ensuing family drama surrounding their grandmother's inheritance. Given how spoiled some of the characters might come across as, the author does well to draw you in and make you care. Plus there is a ton of witty banter, which, for me, is a highlight. I also enjoyed the vividly described setting of the Highclere Inn & Carriage House Resort on Lake Belvedere. And, hang on as you get towards the end, as the story hits with a cool twist!

And yet, the humor… Yes, I praised the witty banter above, but humor is such a hard thing to pitch perfectly, given how subjective hunor is. For me, while it mostly hit, it did occasionally miss the mark and feel overdone. Quips sometimes come out like bullets, with little time for the cleverness to have been formed and enunciated. Which rather mirrors a lot of TV writing these days.

Be aware, too, of the large cast of characters. Not necessarily an actual issue, but forewarned is forearmed. We all know how easy it is to be distracted by life, and when you have a large cast, it can be difficult to recall precisely who is who and what their roles are. Don’t worry too much, though, as the entire cast, and their relationships to other characters, is listed at the beginning. So if you find yourself wondering, don’t forget the list!

There’s a lot to like here, and a lot goes on! The interesting main and supporting characters should hold you all the way, throughout the engaging plot and by story’s end, you’ll likely find A Box of Frogs (super title, by the way—that and the cover are what drew me to this in the first place) an enjoyable read. Think Knives Out meets Scooby Doo (I know!) meets Downton Abby and buckle up for the ride :).

Thanks to the author, the publisher, and to NetGalley for the chance to ride through this ARC all the way to the end!