Berkley
Published May 27, 2025
Reviewed by Meredith Frazier
I admit to being sentimental, but the fact that I was in tears at the end of The Busybody Book Club was a surprise. That’s not how I usually react to cozy mysteries. Plus, I had struggled a bit to get through this one. The plot turns out to be quite convoluted, the characters are interesting, and murders, attempted murders, and various other crimes happen, but it’s not a page-turner, and sometimes it seemed like the biggest mystery was how on earth Nova, one of the main characters, could stomach her mother-in-law-to-be. But, obviously, by the end of the book, I was thoroughly involved with all the quirky, multigenerational characters and their ordeals.
In The Busybody Book Club, Freya Sampson alternates among characters’ points of view to tell the tale of newcomer Nova preparing for her wedding while navigating a new job at the community center in her fiancé’s small English hometown. Things quickly go awry when 10,000 British pounds are stolen from the center’s new-roof fund, and Nova seems to be responsible for the theft in one way or another. Then a woman dies, a book club member disappears, and things spiral further and further out of control. Book club members Phyllis, Arthur, and Ash decide to take solving the multiple mysteries into their own hands, using romance novels, Agatha Christie novels, and a bit of Star Wars as their guides, and Nova, as leader of the book club, becomes a reluctant participant, in spite of the fact that her involvement wreaks havoc with her personal life.
By the end of the book, more mysteries than expected get solved. Some of the plotting is a bit far fetched, some questions and actions require an awful lot of suspension of disbelief, and the reader is likely to guess some (but not all!) of the outcomes before the reveals, but overall, the characters – even with the aforementioned caveats – save the day and the book. These are interesting people who are fun to follow, and they all have secrets and depths to discover. Being a cozy, The Busybody Book Club doesn’t go too deeply into psychology or dark crimes, but we do get a good sense of what drives the characters.
One thing that’s less well defined is the setting. The story takes place in a small town in Cornwall and includes an excursion to the Lizard Peninsula. The scenes at the Lizard Peninsula are nicely detailed with compelling visuals and sensory details, but the other settings are less detailed to the point that I actually had to keep reminding myself that it was set in England. But if you’re looking less for setting and more for interesting characters and heartwarming relationships, you won’t be disappointed.