Union Square
Published on May 12 2026
Reviewed by Meredith Frazier
Second in Nicola Whyte’s series featuring the residents of Marchfield Square, Murder Like Clockwork opens with Audrey Brooks, a housecleaner and sometime amateur sleuth cleaning the little-used London mansion of Anton Petrov, a mysterious figure who is a friend of Audrey’s employer and landlord Celeste van Duren. Audrey discovers a corpse in one of the rooms, but by the time the police arrive 20 minutes later, the corpse and all evidence of a bloody murder have disappeared. The police threaten to charge Audrey with wasting police time, and Audrey realizes she’s once again going to have to enlist part-time crime novelist and fellow amateur sleuth Lewis McLennon and her other neighbors to solve the mystery.
Whyte does a nice job of dropping into the ongoing lives of her recurring characters without causing too much confusion. It’s quickly obvious to a reader coming to this book without having read 10 Marchfield Square that some background events have been missed, but that mostly serves to further pique the interest. These are quirky, likable, believable characters who all have nice depth to them. Whyte’s evocation of present-day London is an added bonus for the armchair traveler. The plot itself gets rather convoluted, but everything gets untangled in the end, and along the way, the main characters and their relationships continue to develop. Whyte keeps the tone light with quiet humor and a nice interplay of personalities. And while the mystery is satisfyingly complicated and resolved, it’s the inhabitants of Marchfield Square who make the most memorable impact and give promise to what hopefully will be a long-running series.