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Reviewed by Priya Mathew for Readers' Favorite
Lakeside Murder by Katherine Fletcher opens with two small wrongs. Dot Halstead, who runs the archive at Kettle Creek’s Historical Society, spots a donated photograph that does not match the shoreline she knows. Around the same time, the town’s sealed 50th-anniversary time capsule is opened and quietly resealed. When a prominent local man turns up dead in the Society’s exhibit room, Dot and her tight circle of four Thursday Book Club friends find themselves pulled into untangling a mystery that reaches back fifty years. The dots they find connect to an old fraud, older grief, and a killer who is closer to them than any of them want to believe.
I started reading Lakeside Murder expecting a standard cozy mystery and found something more interesting. The prose has a different feel than most cozy mysteries I’ve read. Less breezy, more deliberate, in fact closer to literary fiction in places. The four women at the center carry the book. Dot, Beverly, June, and Margaret already have twelve years of Thursday nights behind them. So, they have their own inside jokes, old griefs, and a rhythm that clearly existed before page one. I appreciated that the mystery was not just about who killed Craig Marsh, but also about what gets buried when a town wants a clean anniversary story. I found something satisfying about watching a crime unravel through tax records and old photographs. The land fraud thread, involving families quietly dispossessed of lakefront property back in the seventies, gave the book moral weight. The reveal, when it arrives, is genuinely sadder than triumphant, and we feel the sting instead of being hurried past it. I’m sure fans of cozy mysteries will find Lakeside Murder thoughtful, satisfying, and a bit haunting by the last page. I closed this book wanting to know what the Thursday Book Club would find next.
