I received the requests to review Murder at Midnight and Bedding Down around the same time, and I have to say that Bedding Down was my favorite of the two. Although it could use some polishing, I thought the plot was well-done, the style of writing pretty easy to follow, and the story teasing enough to keep the reader engaged. Although this book is the second in a series, I didn’t have any problem following the story. I’ll give Bedding Down three out of five stars.
When Adam and Sarah’s team is called to investigate the death of a homeless man, they don’t imagine that it will take them down a twisted path of seemingly unconnected events. However, as more people are found killed in the same manner, it becomes clear that there must be a connection somewhere. Readers follow Adam and Sarah’s team through protocol, paperwork, and finding the right people to get answers.
I haven’t read a modern murder mystery in quite some time, so [fictional] police procedure is not my forte. However, I enjoyed following Adam, Sarah, and the team as they talked to people to gather information. I feel that investigators can be either dispassionate about their subjects or too involved, but Garcia wrote Adam, Sarah, and the team as caring but professional investigators. Garcia portrays witnesses as people, not as tools to help the police.
I appreciate that most of the people in this novel want to help the homeless people, but recognize the limitations of the NHS and its ability to sustain the care of everyone that needs it. The homeless people in this novel are people that have fallen through the cracks, either wilfully or by accident, which makes tracing their backgrounds and histories that much more difficult. I did find it a little too convenient, sometimes, that the team was able to track down someone who knew a character 10+ years ago, but I suppose these things do happen.
I really liked that not all the information supplied by the people who knew the characters were helpful. There were a few characters that the police spoke to who could have been taken out of the novel and nothing would have changed. I thought this was significant as I think it reflects what must happen during real investigations.
The plot of this novel was really well done, although I did cotton on pretty early that there had to be more to a certain event than we heard about. It was referenced too little from then on for me to not pay attention to it. However, I think that was just my mystery novel experience speaking to me, and I think the police probably would have put it on the back burner in real life just as they did here. It didn’t seem relevant at all. Garcia fed us a lot of information from a lot of different sources, but she definitely kept the plot moving along well and was able to tease it out like unrolling a ball of yarn. That is a quality I really appreciate in an author as it feels organic and makes me want to keep reading.
Now, there were a couple of downsides to this novel that I think can be improved relatively easily: first, the formatting: in Kindle form, at least, the breaks between different members of the team were not clear. It made the book a little tough to get through because there were breaks that were supposed to be dramatic but instead just read like a separate paragraphs. This may just be Kindle’s fault as to how it read the file and, like I said, should be relatively easy to fix.
Second: editing. I definitely caught grammatical errors in this book; there was at least one “whose” instead of “who’s,” and multiple instances of a comma being used instead of a semicolon. Again, relatively easy fix if Garcia finds someone to edit with a little more knowledge of grammar. It doesn’t have to be an Editor($$$), just a friend or so who can go through and fix some things. Garcia’s got great plot progression and an agreeable style; if she can clean up the formatting I think she can have quite a few book clubs discussing homelessness, its vulnerabilities, and the resources currently offered.
If you’d like to read more by Molly Garcia, you can find her website here.