The Murder Bird: A Novel by Joanna Hines
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

THE MURDER BIRD gets better as it goes along. I picked this one up because one of the main characters is a cellist, and I love music. While this wasn’t a book that made me feel the music as some do, it had an interesting storyline: a mother presumably commits suicide, and her daughter is convinced she was murdered, though no one else does. It took a while to get into this one, perhaps because of the changing viewpoints (side note: maybe it was the advance e-copy I received, but there wasn’t any division between POVs, and quite often I found myself having to go back and reread a section once I realized the POV had shifted), but the mystery is gradually unraveled to most folks’ satisfaction. There are some brilliant pieces of prose in this, and near the end the twists keep coming. It wasn’t quite as thrilling as some mysteries, though there are certainly action sequences, and I didn’t guess the ending, which is always good for a mystery. I have another book by this author in the pipeline, so I hope it’s good too.

I received this as a digital ARC via Netgalley and the publisher.

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