Goodreads Monday: Welcome to Murder Week by Karen Dukess

Goodreads Monday is a really simple weekly meme, hosted by Budget Tales Book Blog, where you choose a book at random from your Goodreads TBR and explain why you want to read it. This meme is also an opportunity to share any progress you have made on your current books, Goodreads Reading Challenge or anything else Goodreads related.

This week’s pick is: Welcome to Murder Week by Karen Dukess

When thirty-four-year-old Cath loses her mostly absentee mother, she is ambivalent. With days of quiet, unassuming routine in Buffalo, New York, Cath consciously avoids the impulsive, thrill-seeking lifestyle that her mother once led. But when she’s forced to go through her mother’s things one afternoon, Cath is perplexed to find tickets for an upcoming “murder week” in England’s Peak. A whole town has come together to stage a fake murder mystery to attract tourism to their quaint hamlet. Baffled but helplessly intrigued by her mother’s secret purchase, Cath decides to go on the trip herself—and begins a journey she never could have anticipated.

Teaming up with her two cottage-mates, both ardent mystery lovers—Wyatt Green, forty, who works unhappily in his husband’s birding store, and Amity Clark, fifty, a divorced romance writer struggling with her novels—Cath sets about solving the “crime” and begins to unravel shocking truths about her mother along the way. Amidst a fling—or something more—with the handsome local maker of artisanal gin, Cath and her irresistibly charming fellow sleuths will find this week of fake murder may help them face up to a very real crossroads in their own lives.

Witty, wise, and deliciously escapist, Welcome to Murder Week is a fresh, inventive twist on the murder mystery and a touching portrayal of one daughter’s reckoning with her grief, her past—and her own budding sense of adventure.

Why do I want to read it?:

Lately I’ve been enjoying cosy mysteries and this book seems perfectly cosy and mysterious. It’s the kind of book I will probably listen to on audio, just because I like all of the characters being narrated for me.

This week’s reading progress:

One audiobook and half an ARC.

If you like cosy mysteries too, I can highly recommend No One was Supposed to Die at this Wedding by Catherine Mack on audio.

2025 Goodreads Reading Challenge: 59/75 books (79%)