Sometimes I feel like a curmudgeon for not liking a book — books do many things, and one book can be something entirely different to so many people, that it feels rather lousy when something just passes you by entirely.

Case in point, The Nine Night Mystery (2024) by Sharna Jackson, the sequel to her earlier The Good Turn (2022), which I appreciated without really loving. Both books do so much that I have time for — giving an uncommon view of family and friendship, foregrounding cultural heritages and practices which aren’t acknowledged terribly regularly in crime books for younger readers, and building a sense of a community from the people who you have around you — but, honestly, I come to these Minor Felonies books (hell, to practically all the books I read) for the plot, and for plot this lacks.

The essential idea is good: a woman dies after a party, and a traditional Nine Night Celebration is held to allow her soul to move over to the afterlife. The three young people who form the nexus of this series — Wesley, Margot, and Josephine, known collectively (to themselves, at least) as “The Copseys” — therefore reason that they have the duration of this celebration to catch their friend’s killer so that she’ll be at peace. It provides a core focus, weaving in the timescale of the nine nights so that it both feeds the plot and potentially widens the cultural appreciation of the audience, and should, therefore, make a great background to the sort of inventive and enjoyable mystery that Jackson mined to brilliantly in her debut, High-Rise Mystery (2019).

My main problem? There’s no reason to assume Rachel has been murdered.

I’m honestly not sure if I missed something here — it’s a long book, we’ll get to that, and I’ve done some skimming back and forth and must apologise if I’ve missed a key point — but it seems that Wesley finds Rachel’s body in the opening chapter, and the fact that there are also things in the room which belong to other people who live in the close makes him…suspect that one of them might have killed her? Do I have that right? It’s just a weird leap to make, and one that sort of felt rather false given how this angle plays out.

Jackson is much, much more successful in the various sturm und drang complications that betoken this sort of mystery, with suspicious behaviour, hidden motives, and lots of twists and turns on the part of the adults surrounding our youthful trio building a suitably complex tale around this thoroughly unsuspicious death. As a piece of suspect-everyone-in-the-vicinity it’s a triumph, and there are some solid reversals throughout and, for younger readers, a definite sense of peril as everyone seems to have something to hide and some reason for not wanting the investigation into Rachel’s life to continue.

My god, though, is it ever long.

I feel like an old man here, but why are so many books for younger readers so damn long these days? This paperback is nearly 500 pages and — like The Swifts (2023) and Murder! By Narwhal! (2024) before it — that is simply too many pages. You could cut 20% off of all of these books and they’d be tighter, more readable, and more enjoyable as a result. Jackson at least triumphs over those two other examples in that there isn’t an obvious lump of 100 consecutive pages of prose you could rip out without affecting the plot overall, but, dude, I can’t help but feel that an editor should have gone over this much more rigorously and kept the ideas more focussed. Yes, some of the charm is that the Copseys go about things in a juvenile and thus inefficient manner, but if we want strict realism then none of this would have happened anyway.

I’m telling you, High-Rise Mystery’s Nik and Norva would have wrapped this up in half the time.

As a piece of detection, though, this again deserves kudos for keeping its lines clean even if they are too long. The occasional tabulation of information, the way the Copseys discuss things to keep the various developments fresh for the reader…all that’s great, and Jackson has a fine career as a wrangler of unpicking threads ahead of her…but, for me, shorter would be better. Side note: I find it interesting there are no acknowledgements in the book, and wonder how much support she received in the writing of it — it can, after all, be difficult to kill your darlings (believe me, I know!).

So, once again, I find myself a little torn. A tighter plot would have raised this in my estimations, but I don’t want to dismiss the content of Jackson’s achievement here. Once again, it’s perhaps fairest to acknowledge that this book simply missed me, whether due to when I read it or some other factor. I’ll keep reading Jackson’s work, because her first two books really were rather wonderful, but the themes she seems to wish to explore — important and wholesome though they are — seem to require something more than the trappings of the murder mystery to enable them to be explored as thoroughly and humanely as she does. I believe she has another excellent, tightly-focussed, culturally diverse novel of youthful detection in her, but, for me, this isn’t it yet. When she reconciles these two sides of her writing, though, I think the result is going to be spectacular.