Dead in the Doorway (House-Flipper Mystery #2)

Dead in the Doorway is the second House-Flipper mystery by Diane Kelly. Released 31st March 2020 by Macmillan on their St. Martin's imprint, it's 352 pages available in paperback, audio, and ebook formats.  It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

This is an engaging and well written cozy mystery with a full complement of quirky neighbors, old houses, plucky female amateur sleuth, requisite grumpy (but handsome) law enforcement officer, much hated (and violently deceased) neighbor, resultant investigations, and a cat who gets some 3rd person narrative alternating with his owner, protagonist house-flipper Whitney. The chapters are labeled with the primary PoV character, so they're easy to keep track of.

The writing is appealing and entertaining, very light and engaging. The language is clean, the violence is off scene, there's nothing to horrify or scandalize. The author does refer unnecessarily to the house which Whitney and co. are flipping as the "flip-house" about a zillion times (I counted 66 instances, which is about 60 too many). It wasn't a huge deal, it's easy enough to glide over, but it did get to the point fairly quickly where it yanked me out of the story every time. Other than that, the denouement is well written and the book moves along at a good clip. I enjoyed it. I was previously unfamiliar with the series and this one worked well enough as a standalone.  I will keep an eye out for more books in the series. It's exactly the kind of fun cozy I enjoy on a lazy weekend afternoon.

Four stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes