Book 24 for my 2025 goal of 30 books for the year! As is now default for me, my link to the book is through my bookshop dot org affiliate account.

I’ve been online friends with Brandy Schillace for a number of years through science communication, and earlier this year was a guest on her podcast The Peculiar Book Club talking about my own book on Invisibility. Last year, she released her first novel The Framed Women of Ardmore House, though I didn’t get a chance to read it — had a lot going on in my life in 2024 — but I vowed I would catch up with her next book, The Dead Come to Stay, which just released this month.

When Jo Jones moved to North Yorkshire to take over her family estate, she expected it would be a peaceful change of pace. Instead, she became entangled in a murder case (The Framed Women of Ardmore House) that led to the burning of the main manor house. She has plans to open the historic gardens of the estate to the public, but in the meantime has to make ends meet and opts to rent out a room in her cottage. Her first guest arrives late at night and seems like a nice enough fellow, but he is found dead in a ditch the next day. This brings in the town detective James MacAdams to investigate, and right off the bat the case doesn’t make sense. Clearly the guest was murdered, but not at Jo’s home, and he seems not even to have spent the night in the room he rented.

While MacAdams puzzles over the mystery, Jo has her own less lethal mystery to solve. She has been tracking down the history of her ancestors, including a late uncle she lost touch with and a mysterious woman in a painting that was deliberately defaced. Jo’s investigation will lead her to cross paths with MacAdams again and again, and the two of them end up drawing ever closer to a criminal conspiracy — and a murderer who is willing to do anything to keep it a secret.

I am not typically a reader of mystery novels, so I don’t have much of the genre to compare to, but I enjoyed The Dead Come to Stay immensely! The story, the setting, and the characters kept pulling me along and I read more chapters than I intended to every night until I finished, which was only three nights.

Jo Jones is just a fabulous character. An autistic woman, she has a curiosity and attention to detail that propels her forward and deeper into intrigue, even though she is not deliberately trying to solve any crimes. She’s not a traditional Poirot or Marple, working as a consulting detective, but is a woman working to unravel her own family history. The character is clearly informed by Schillace’s experiences as an autistic woman herself, and it is a lot of fun to see the world through the character’s eyes. MacAdams and his colleague Green are a lot of fun themselves and it is fun to watch them struggle to put together the pieces of the murder puzzle. In fact, all of the characters bring their own, well, character to the story, and there isn’t a single one that doesn’t stand out as a unique and interesting individual. The characters bring the story to life in a way that is rare for me to see in any novel.

The murder mystery itself is very satisfying, and one can tell that Schillace has put a lot of thought into the details of the case and the clues. As one would expect in a good murder mystery, nothing fully makes sense until the final act, when Jo, MacAdams and the murderer collide in a final confrontation.

A major part of the charm of the novel is, however, Jo’s investigation of her family background. This is a compelling mystery in its own right, and I really had a good time just following along with Jo as she worked to figure things out. It is also fun watching Jo, a city-born American, adapting to life in the rural UK.

As I’ve noted above, this is a follow-up book to The Framed Women of Ardmore House, but one doesn’t need to read that book to enjoy and understand this one — the prior events and background are explained well enough to make this novel self-contained. I, however, will be going back to read the earlier book to get a bit more of Jo’s adventures, while I wait (presumably) for more to come!

In summary, The Dead Come to Stay is a really enjoyable and compelling read with a satisfying conclusion! I will be looking out for more of Schillace’s fiction in the future.