An isolated, snowbound mansion, a wealthy family at each other’s throats…you’d frankly be disappointed if this setup didn’t result in a murder.

Having given us a murderous melee at an elite school in her debut This Book Kills (2022), Ravena Guron extends her scope for her second criminous offering Catch Your Death (2023): this time we’re in the English countryside at Bramble Estate, the family pile of the magnificently rich Emily Vanforte, who has gathered an assortment of family and associates — her husband Chalres, their daughter Lottie, and her nephew Tate, along with Lottie’s boyfriend Douglas — intent on revealing the scandalous secrets of at least one of them to the others over dinner. What Emily Vanforte hasn’t accounted for, however, is the two teenage girls who are stranded at the mansion along with them due to a heavy snowfall: Lizzie Newton-Hill, who was making a delivery to Mrs. Vanforte, and Devi Mistry, who was on her way to visit her grandmother.

What Emily Vanforte also apparently failed to account for was that the person she was due to expose might very well wish their secrets to stay hidden, and, since we open on a newspaper clipping telling us of her death by poisoning on the evening in question, it seems those secrets are likely to stay in the shadows. Or, at least, they would be, except that Devi and Lizzie, along with teenage maid-of-all-work Jayne who has been employed at the Bramble Estate for the past few months, seem rather determined to bring the killer to justice.

Guron has a lot of themes in her sights in this book — the sometimes-questionable actions of the wealthy, the casual dismissal of people due to their gender or background, the connections we form and how meaningful they are, and the nature of truth among them — and it’s perhaps no surprise that it takes a little while for the pot to get boiling. She must set her scene, introduce her characters, and bring the three teenagers at the heart of this story to life so that you care for them before even really attempting an assault on any of the issues she intends to face, and so at times in the first third it can feel like a lot of shovelling is being done without much progress being made.

It helps that Devi is a pleasingly blunt protagonist (“[U]nlike the crap you read in fairytales, I know rich people like to marry other rich people. Princes don’t pluck randos off the street and decide to shower them with wealth – not unless they’re beautiful.”) whose call-a-spade-a-spade attitude puts her among the rather more forthright narrators I’ve read in this endeavour (the moment she refers to one suspect as “a massive bellend” is, I cannot deny, bloody hilarious). The book suffers when we’re not seeing things through Devi’s eyes, and you start to realise that a lot of what’s gone on has been very showy and designed for chapter-ending cliffhangers (a box full of heads! a stash of knives!) with very little substance to it.

Which is not to say that the book is without interest. The lights go out (of course…) and there’s a good sense of creeping dread at being trapped with people you don’t know in unfamiliar ground. Akin to John Dickson Carr’s novel The Four False Weapons (1938), we know Mrs. Vanforte was poisoned and yet it’s other means of death that keep appearing in the narrative. And, while it might give Ronald Knox apoplexy, there’s a kind of giddy delight in Guron unveiling secret passage after secret passage running through the walls of the rambling manor. And, look, the fact that you’re never really sure what Devi is going to say next is honestly a real draw:

[T]here was a possibility he was not a pervert, but a murderer. Or a pervert and a murderer. People can be more than just one thing.

Not being the target audience, I found myself looking slightly ahead regarding some of the decisions — Devi, Jayne, and Lizzie all narrate their own chapters in the first person, and the last two are pretty hard to tell apart — which meant that some of the clever ideas Guron starts to play with once the murder occurs didn’t quite catch me out as they obviously should. You’re best off not thinking about it, and the places it goes are pleasingly complex for all sorts of reasons, but this is squarely a thriller over a novel of detection, albeit one with some canny ideas and a real sense of the people at its core. It is also very well written at times, with some naturalistic reflections on the way women might escape an unsavoury relationship and a few beats of reflection that really hit home (“He’d been there for my first breath…I was there for this last.”)

Catch Your Death made me appreciate why I prefer clued detection to thrillers — the need to introduce your ideas and account for all your actions, so it almost feels like the narrative gets smaller rather than bigger, is so much more of a challenge — but I can’t deny that I had a lot of fun with the first 80% of this, only really feeling my interest lagging in the final stretch because it seemed we’d been going for such a long time. Some tighter editing, perhaps aided by seeing the story only through Devi’s eyes, would, in my amateur opinion, improve this, but I had fun and will almost certainly check out Guron’s next criminous endeavour Mondays Are Murder (2025) when it gets here.