From the Bookshelf of Big Book Summer Reading Challenge 2023…

The Girls on Chalk Hill (Detective Lexi Bennett #1)

Alison Belsham

Start date: June 5, 2023

Finish date: June 11, 2023

Why we're reading this: 408 pages, pub date 6/26/2023
[close] 408 pages, pub date 6/26/2023

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Jun 11, 2023 Melinda rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2023, ebook, netgalley, mystery

Grade: A

Sometimes books are excellent because they are the best at what they are--they aren't anything that subverts tropes or turns readers on their heads. They take a genre and excel at it. This is one of those books.

This is the first in a new procedural crime series, and it succeeds on both counts. As the first in a series, we meet Lexi Bennett, a detective who has returned to her hometown in southern England after spending several years in the United States to study profiling with the FBI (i Grade: A

Sometimes books are excellent because they are the best at what they are--they aren't anything that subverts tropes or turns readers on their heads. They take a genre and excel at it. This is one of those books.

This is the first in a new procedural crime series, and it succeeds on both counts. As the first in a series, we meet Lexi Bennett, a detective who has returned to her hometown in southern England after spending several years in the United States to study profiling with the FBI (is this a thing people do? I don't know, and I don't care. I bought it). While the mystery is fully fleshed out, Belsham skillfully drops hints in the narrative to inform us that Lexi has a history and hooks us into wanting to know more about her in future books. We also meet a few secondary characters that might play a bigger role down the line.

As for being a procedural, this is also a win. Belsham takes the time to go into the procedures the police follow when trying to solve this crime. As for the crime, don't be fooled by the mention of "girls" in the title. This is not another saga of an alcoholic, unreliable female narrator. This is a crime involving girls--two dead and one missing; and one missing and two recovered. The crime is intricate and absorbing, especially as we not only follow Lexi and her team as they scramble to solve the crime before another death occurs, but we also hear from the culprit, which is fascinating and unsettling. The reveal floored me, and I applaud Belsham for completely surprising me.

Only one factor kept this book from hitting an A+. I could not understand why Lexi, with her history as outlined in the summary of this book, would ever be in charge of this investigation! I'm not sure if this is a US/UK difference (there is no police department in the US that would allow her to lead this investigation, but I don't know about the UK) or if it is something that requires us to suspend our disbelief to make the story work. There were also a few threads that were never fully explained, and I felt as though they had been "cut for time." Neither of these was a huge distraction for me, but I noticed them enough to factor them into my grade for the book.

A good book series makes me want to read the next entry. An excellent book series makes me want to buy the next entry RIGHT NOW! My greatest disappointment is that the sequel is still forthcoming. But I'll be watching for it, and I can't wait to follow Lexi Bennett to solve her next crime.

In return for an honest review, I was given an electronic ARC of this book from Bookouture through Netgalley. ...more

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Aug 08, 2023 Elinor marked it as to-read

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