When bestselling Shropshire crime writer Annie Morrissey is found dead in her garden, apparently after slipping from a ladder while fixing guttering, her daughter Niamh is suspicious and uses her mother’s final manuscript to try and understand her death. She is helped in this quest by the sudden and baffling appearance of her mum’s main character, PI Leah Overton, who has some different approaches to the investigation. Their work initially focuses on the neighbours in the small village her mother had recently moved to, uncovering secrets along the way. Other avenues include her mum’s agent and publishing rivals, but things come to a peak at a crime-writing festival in Portmeirion. Putting on her mum’s designer event blazer, Niamh finally understands her mother better and learns a lot about herself in life-changing ways. It is a meta-murder mystery that also works as a real murder mystery, but is full of fun and clever commentary about crime writing and the publishing industry. Niamh is a brilliant neurodivergent protagonist, explicitly written as aromantic and asexual, who finds herself at odds with the demands of the genre. Leah, the hardboiled protagonist of Annie’s books, acts as an excellent foil.