Quick read for a cold winter day. Enjoyed reading about the Sicly Islands off of Cornwall, did not know that they even existed! Will probable read the next in the series as I liked the descriptions.

Fun book! Adult sisters take a weekend getaway trip together to a remote British island and it does not go as the more reserved one planed because the other sister's propensity for spinning tall tales gets them in to trouble, over and over. Trying to inquire about the status of her spouse's loan of money to one on the island's inhabitants sets off a chain of unexpected and unintended consequences. As someone said during the weekend, "This could have been a Poirot episode."

If you like cozy mysteries with a bit of extra tension, pick up this quick new read.

I enjoyed this mystery. An island with a hotel and lighthouse made for a great setting. The characters were quirky and sometimes abrasive but not enough to make me dislike the book. I enjoyed the mystery itself and look forward to more in this series.

This book didn't hang together at all. The characters were unbelievable and largely unlikable and the situations lacked common sense.

Death at High Tide by Hannah Dennison is the first in a new series ( The Island Sisters Mystery series ). I have to admit this is my first read of Ms. Dennison and I was thoroughly impressed. I love myself a good cozy mystery, but add fun and quirky characters and a wonderful location (The Isles of Scilly off the coast of Cornwall) and you have got yourself an enjoyable book.

Evie and Margot are sisters (who to me seem like opposites) that end up entangled into several murders and a fun, complex mystery that ensues kept my attention from beginning to end. Evie is still recovering from the loss of her husband, and Margot is more of the higher-maintenance type, yet their differences seem to play off each other well. No, neither are saintly and perfect, but their imperfections make this book more interesting to me. Still, they are still sisters, and family stick together.

I enjoyed meeting the unique and quirky cast of characters that inhabit the island and the pacing and plot were appropriate and enjoyable. I was not able to figure out the culprit until towards the end.

I enjoyed the start of this new series and look forward to all of the wonderful things that Ms. Dennison will be able to do with the characters in future installments.

A great start!

4/5 stars

Thank you NetGalley and Minotaur/St. Martin’s Press for this ARC and in return I am submitting my unbiased and voluntary review and opinion.

I am posting this review to my GR and Bookbub accounts immediately and will post it to my Amazon and B&N accounts upon publication.

I didn't like most of this book. It feels unorganized, and loose in the story line. The early part of the book is boring in my view. I did enjoy the ending where the killer is revealed, and the fight is going on but that was mostly it. It's got a good story, it just needs to be tightened up. #DeathatHighTide #NetGalley

The only good thing about this book is that it’s a fast read. Every character is awful. Our main character is meant to be a grieving widow who just recently lost her husband suddenly. She says she’s grieving but it isn’t shown. Telling me a character is grieving but not showing it won’t make me sympathetic to them. I felt nothing but annoyance for this character. Whenever she looked at someone there was an instant rattle off of the brands they were wearing. And every man she meets is attractive. Every single one.

She has a sister who is a caricature of the Hollywood producer. Blond, too skinny, loud and abrasive. She wears expensive clothing and name drops more than any actual person ever would. It is impossible to take her seriously. The sister is totally fine being in her sibling’s business and being nosy but when it’s the other way around and genuine concern she explodes. The way they handle each other doesn’t feel like a real sibling relationship.

That and the sister talks about trying to set up her recently widowed sister with one of the men they meet. It doesn’t sit well with the image of a grieving widow at all. But that image is barely there.
There’s an old woman who’s nosy, another who cheats, an abusive husband, various other people.
I take serious issue with a few things. One: one of the characters is suffering from a terminal illness. He’s taking very high doses of morphine. Out of nowhere he doubles over in pain and needs his medication. Less than twenty minutes later it’s apparently kicked in.

That’s not how it works, and media always gets this wrong. Firstly, someone suffering an illness who needs to take strong medication for it is always highly aware of the time to avoid being doubled over or incapacitated by their pain. It takes, at the very minimum thirty minutes for oral medication to begin to work because it has to be digested. I suffer from this myself and seeing it portrayed incorrectly when it’s so easy to get right is infuriating.

Next, the main character learns one of the others has a prison history. She immediately says that she sees this tattooed woman in a different light. Her tattoos become ominous, could they be gang affiliated. Yet she already knows one of the tattoos is just the stereotypical “name and name forever” type. Like names carved into a tree.
Not only does the sister name drop, but there’s also another older woman who talks too much about Netflix, the Kardashians, Game of Thrones. That and iPhones was mentioned multiple times. Too many brands that were listed in clusters. While they are real, they felt so out of place in the book and will do nothing but date the book as the years go by and these things become obsolete.

The first murder happens at the fifty percent point of the book and it holds no shock value at all. There was nothing about it that made me care. We’re given a sob story by the man who found the body who acts incredibly creepy and continuously grabs the main character even though she says to let go. The story of how he met the deceased is meant to be emotional but it comes out of nowhere and therefore has no real effect.
I will not be giving this author another read.

Ms. Dennison has brilliantly woven together lots of twists and turns, and some questionable characters to make this a book that can’t be put down once you start reading it. Evie Mead and her sister travel to a Sicilian island for a spa weekend when Edie finds out it’s possible she inherited a castle. The castle is isolated on an island and old and decrepit. There are quite a mixture of eccentric people living in the castle. A few murders are thrown in, and the murderer was not anyone I guessed. The author has done a tremendous job of describing the characters and their quirks. I would recommend this book to mystery readers. I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley and St Martin’s Press. All opinions expressed are my own.

A clever mystery filled with quirky characters! Evie Mead, a recent widow, and her sister visit their family lawyer and find out she might have inherited an old hotel on one of the Isles of Scilly. The sisters fly out to what they hope will be a spa weekend, only to find the hotel is decrepit and rundown. The owner claims he never met the deceased husband, even though there are photos on the wall with the two of them together. Much confusion ensues, with a couple of murders thrown in. The hotel is isolated, and it is difficult to get on and off the island due to the tide. So, you have “inmates running the asylum,” a variety of misfits and n’er do wells, and many unanswered questions. The plot was as twisty and mysterious as the inside of the hotel. I didn’t particularly care for any of the characters, but the writing, humor and plot development drew me in anyway. I liked how so many totally different personalities ended up working together. Everyone had a unique history, and somehow, it all turned out well, story-wise. I can see these troubled and troublesome sisters as a series. Author did a great job tying so many different factors neatly together. I read this in one sitting and enjoyed it.
Thanks to Netgalley, the publisher and Ms. Dennison for an ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

At the family lawyer after the sudden death of her older husband, Evie Mead, along with her sister Margot, learn there is probably no money left, but she might, just might have inherited a hotel in the middle of nowhere that is impossible to reach and run down. Deciding on a whim to check it out they meet various characters and over the course of the weekend two murders occur.
I didn’t like this book at all. I didn’t care what happened to the main character, getting no real sense of her, and the surrounding people we met, including her sister were extremely mercurial and nasty. Her dead husband didn’t even come off as a nice man The book didn’t seem gothic at all in the true sense, and I felt the whole book dreary.

A thrilling, riveting mystery with a beautifully descriptive (almost gothic) setting, interesting and unusual characters and a compelling plot. Evie Mead is a recent widow, and finds out that her husband Robert had lost most of his money and the only thing he left her was the rights to Tregarrick Rock, a hotel in the Scilly Isles, that she inherits due to a supposedly unpaid debt. Evie and her sister Margot go to visit the hotel and find it closed except for Jago and Tegan who believe they are the owners, along with some other unusual characters. When people start getting killed, Evie and Margot need to defend themselves and find out who and why these things are happening. This was a wonderful book, a really great well-written mystery and I highly recommend it.

An isolated hotel on one of the Isles of Scilly is the setting for this twisty mystery. Evie Mead is mourning the loss of her husband when she comes across paperwork that states she may own an old hotel on Tregarrick Rock. While Evie is still overcome with grief, her sister, Margot, books them both a flight to Tregarrick, thinking that both sisters are in for a spa weekend. Sadly the old hotel has lost most of its shine and glamour from the days when it was a hangout for mystery novelists. The man who claims to own the hotel says he’s never heard of Evie’s husband, even after Evie finds pictures of the two men together. Then there is a murder at the hotel, and then another. The sisters are stuck on the island until the tide turns and who knows what will happen in the mean time. The setting for this book and the peripheral weird characters make this story shine. And the old “stranded on an island with an unknown killer plot”, is as exciting as ever