4/5 stars: This is the first entry in Curran's Callie Kinsey Mystery series which is a Cozy Mystery set in Michigan and follows a TV news reporter with a passion for riding horses as she turns sleuth after she stumbles across the body of a wealthy missing equestrian strangled in a ditch near a prestigious stable. Fighting to keep her job, she's determined uncover who among this elite crowd is killing them off one by one, despite being snubbed by the victim's snobby friends and being the top of the list of suspects. She'll have wade through secrets and lies and work fast to uncover the killer before she becomes the next victim. With plenty of twists and turns, Curran has crafted a mystery that deftly balances the suspects, clues and red herrings and will leave you pondering the whodunit until the final reveal. Heartfelt and humorous, Curran's writing and character work are excellent; the characters are well-rounded and complex while remaining likable. Callie's a determined, smart and tough lady and I liked getting to know her, her friends and colleagues at WMIV Channel 5. Oh and I look forward to seeing where things go with “cute cop” police officer Troy. Additionally, I enjoyed the inclusion of the riding and equestrian details and spending time with Callie's horse Cassidy. Plus it's interesting seeing the behind the scenes work of how TV news gets made. With tact and sensitivity, Curran touches on some tough topics; so take care and CWs.

I received this eARC thanks to NetGalley and O'Neill Books / Bronzeville Books in exchange for an honest review. Publishing dates are subject to change.

Thank you to NetGalley, the author and publishers for access to this ARC 📚.

🔥Quick Fire Review🔥

Genre/Themes: 📹👮🏻‍♂️🕵🏻📰 🐎
Tropes: Small Town Gossip, Investigative Journalist, Framed, Murder, Serial Killer, Strangulation, Red Herring, Suspect List, Men in Uniform, Wrong Place Wrong Time
Positives ✅ : a fun, easy read with engaging whodunnit plot
Room for Improvement 🔎 : somewhat predictable and anti-climatic reveal, typos, cheesy/corny in parts especially the ending, underdeveloped supporting characters and lacklustre romance
Rating: 🌕🌕🌕

✍🏻Full Review - RISK OF SPOILERS 🛑

I reached for this book as a lifelong horse girl. I saw horses, I saw crime mystery and that was enough for me. This gave me so much nostalgia for the horse books I read, like Chestnut Hill, in the early 2000s with the cliquey competition between girls but with a crime mystery adult twist.

Characterisation:
A bit of a mixed bag in this novel, and as a result I have quite a lot to say about it so bear with me!
Callie Kinsey is the main character, and she is an ambitious up-and-coming news reporter who happens to board her horse at the high-end livery yard Chanticleer. Callie was an entertaining read for the most part, if not a bit frustrating at times. For somebody as intelligent as she is she sure likes jumping to conclusions and putting herself in seriously perilous situations just for ‘the story’. She also fancies herself an amateur detective, which is where the story started to feel a little bit corny and unrealistic. She also has some very confusing values which I can only put down to the early 2000s vibes. The beauty standards Callie believes in are continuously reiterated throughout the book, the ‘Divas’ being described as ‘skinny’ or ‘the perfect size 2’ or ‘perfect size 0’ while anybody bigger than that is ‘robust’. When Callie doesn’t want to be seen eating a pizza it’s because she is afraid she would look like ‘a cow’ in front of the cop she fancies. This is, sadly, quite a realistic depiction of expectations in the equestrian world. Yes, you cannot be excessively overweight for the welfare of the horses you ride but, like the rest of the world, the acceptance of other body types needs to be welcomed. Then, to add to the impossible beauty standards, the same women who Callie describes as physically perfect or stunning are then criticised and judged for seeing plastic surgeons by her or other characters. It’s also glossed over that they all get backstreet prescription drugs including weight loss drugs or sedatives, suggesting the pressure they all feel to remain as a ‘blonde bombshell’. It was just a strange combination of idolisation of unrealistic beauty standards while simultaneously a commentary or critique of it, but unfortunately all wrapped up in bits of internalised misogyny and fatphobia. Callie also always had undertones of criticism when she described the uber-rich people she encounters, everybody being a wife or heir of some tycoon or another and how they all donate to charity to improve their image yet live ostentatiously and almost segregated from ‘normal’ people. And yet, at the end of the book, she is delighted to win a frankly ridiculous amount of money for her story. I found it difficult to tell where the author stood on it all, and therefore found it difficult to understand Callie’s morals or beliefs or find her attempts at humour funny. Despite that, I did find her likeable.
Ben, her work partner, is a fine character. Nothing to write home about, really. He is protective of Callie but a lot more down-to-earth and realistic than she is. He would have worked as a good counter or balance to Callie but he usually ended up giving in to her whims and impulses. The other people who work for Channel 5 are, again, a bit non-descript. I don’t really remember their names but I just remember Callie feeling this immense pressure to get a good, big story.
The ‘Divas’ are the main catalysts of the novel. This was already a little bit of a corny aspect, the fact that they had a group name but are implied to be in their 30s/40s. I still don’t remember if they called themselves the Divas or if that is just what they were known as, but they had their own dedicated section of the livery yard and their own common room. They were essentially just shown as the elite. Upstanding citizens by day but ‘wild’ by night. All were wives or ex-wives of multi-millionaires. One, according to Callie, ‘didn’t come from money’ but had now acquired it through a marriage or messy divorce settlement, I forget which. Tab Chandler probably had the most dialogue of all them and was portrayed as a sneaky manipulator. She is apparently ‘addicted to donating to charity’, like a ‘compulsion’. Yet she spends the whole book trying to place the blame for the murders on one her fellow ‘Divas’, showing she is just a self-preserving back-stabber. Sperry is the most likeable Diva, being quite carefree and open to which Callie finds herself feeling prudish about sometimes. Callie also admires her for taking her cheating husband to the cleaners. Halle didn’t have much writing dedicated to her personality, which was a shame as she was probably the most important part of the mystery. Callie only speaks directly to her a couple of times, but she is shown to be highly strung and anxious and gets into some heated arguments throughout the book. Another Diva called Christa was, again, only spoken to directly a couple of times and was rude to Callie for no real reason. She also fancied herself a reality TV star. I think there may have been another Diva or two but I don’t remember their names at all, so we didn’t really learn much about them. Covey, the mysterious and quite frankly weird groom was, for me, a lacklustre villain. He’s essentially a drifter and to be honest I thought Callie was dumb to not suspect him sooner. He could never be found anywhere, appeared at totally random moments and made up inflated and unbelievable stories about his life. Sperry and Callie kept pushing this idea that he was charming and likeable but I honestly didn’t see it. The other villainous characters including Kasserman, the man who owned the estate the murders happened on, and another guy (I don’t remember his name) who was taking time off from working at Chanticleer due to a mental breakdown, were also underwritten. Kasserman just shot his gun at anyone for no real reason, and the other guy was a very obvious Red Herring who attacked Callie for no other reason than… being the Red Herring. Callie’s romantic interest, who she endearingly calls ‘Cute Cop’, was… fine. To be honest he reminded me of Covey. Apparently charming and funny but I honestly found him a little forward and creepy. So I wasn’t particularly invested in their romance at all. They would have an evening date spent ‘talking and laughing for hours’ but we don’t hear any of it, so their relationship didn’t feel like it developed very naturally.
Other supporting characters are Maggie who is Callie’s riding instructor, Callie’s mum, the police officers involved in the murder cases, the owner of Chanticleer, Talia’s widower husband, Sperry’s sister and most bizarrely… Sperry’s hairdresser? Maggie was nice, but fairly fleeting. Callie’s mum was a ridiculous character, apparently a hippy who is overly invested in Callie’s life to the point of calling the police on her for getting changed in her car. She just seemed to get in the way, honestly. The police officers were fine but unrealistically unprofessional. They told Callie far too much stuff even though they suspected her at multiple points. Even when they did suspect her they did nothing about it. Chanticleer’s owner was again, fleeting. He enjoyed the press of his equestrian centre one minute then got angry about it and loathed Callie for it later down the line. Talia’s widower husband was very briefly depicted as a villain. His relationship with Talia sounded quite interesting and complex, I wished we’d discovered more from his point of view. Sperry’s sister just seemed more inconvenienced by her sister’s death and lavish funeral wishes, and Sperry’s hairdresser was just an over-the-top depiction of a gay best friend. He had a dramatic breakdown while he was styling her corpses hair for an open casket and then for some reason was at the equestrian centre at the very end with Callie and the Divas as if he had any real involvement in the plot. Overall, I think there were far too many characters crammed in and not enough time to fully flesh them out. At one point Christa got a PR manager to help her film a demo for a reality show, for example.

World-Building:
The story is set in a rural area of the US and based around the elite equestrian centre Chanticleer. I don’t live in the US, so I’m not sure how accurate the depiction or Chanticleer was especially with it being divided into ‘wings’ with the Divas having the much fancier stalls and leisure areas. Chanticleer has its own guest house, where Callie ends up living for a while. The centre is bordered by a lavish, sprawling estate of fields and a country mansion with a guest house, belonging to the evasive Kasserman. The closest village is a good drive away. Sperry lives in a mansion with enough acreage to contain a lake. The Divas are ‘socialites’ for the most part and all drive Range Rovers, so there’s a big push on the amount of wealth in the area. There is a lot of talk of the Divas spending time in Florida, apparently being ‘wild’, or going ‘down South’ for some competition circuit or another but we don’t spend any time there. In a way I enjoyed the closed community and rurality the story was set in because it did mean everybody could have technically been a suspect. A big part of Callie’s world is the competition against other news channels to be the first to publish a story. The unrealistic aspect of this, of course, was that Callie basically got involved in solving the crime and investigating suspects which in the real world would have been a huge obstruction of justice.

Prose\Plot:
I genuinely really enjoyed the plot and the crime mystery. The misunderstanding plot of Halle secretly being an escort and getting unwittingly involved with Kasserman was an entertaining way to clear her name. Talia’s husband tricking Callie and Ben into filming him commit suicide was a dark twist and added more mystery with murders still happening with him no longer a suspect. I was really engrossed in the whodunnit until the villain was revealed. Covey was just such an uninteresting character to me, and his motive could have been explored a bit more. The escort secrecy and the shaming of Covey’s mum, saying that he became a serial killer because she constantly abandoned him for her next sexual escapade felt a little early 2000s slut-shaming again. Anyway, Covey stealing horse sedative and using horse lead lines to kill his victims was an interesting twist. It wasn’t very realistic at times with Callie basically trespassing in Tab Chandler’s locker and stalking the victim’s families or following leads behind law enforcements backs. She and Ben even had a board like they do in TV shows with all the suspects, motives and leads. But hey, it was fun. I actually felt the equestrian side of things was underutilised. Judging by the cover and the setting I was hoping there’d be more horses involved other than a couple of hacks. With the Divas being part of the ‘circuit’ I supposed I’d hoped to have seen more of this lifestyle. With a big part of the plot being related to illegally acquired drugs this could have played nicely into the competitive aspects of equestrian sports. Another bizarre aspect was that Callie had some seriously traumatic experiences, namely watching someone commit suicide in front of her, discovering multiple corpses and being attacked and sexually assaulted outside a bar. But it just seemed to be very glossed over? There was no real exploration of her trauma? By the end she just won all the prize money, got the guy and the fame and that was it. Solved. The reality TV show segment felt a little shoe-horned in, with Christa and her PR manager basically planning a fall to make an interesting audition tape. Because I knew so little about Christa this whole side plot felt a little rushed, but the mystery of her disappearance reeled me back in. Overall, the plot wasn’t as horse-themed as I’d hoped and aspects of the prose a bit outdated but I still enjoyed myself and read the book easily.

I was really excited for this book after reading the blurb, but unfortunately the book couldn’t deliver. The Characters were not really relatable and the story lacked the suspense. Quite disappointing, to be honest!

Divas ’Til Death by Mary Curran
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️


A perfect, cosy murder mystery, what you’d expect from a Hallmark movie, is the only way I can describe this book.

Callie Kinsey, the FMC, strays across a dead body while out hacking. From there it’s a race against time to figure out who did it while trying not to be the next victim herself.

A little fact about me, I’m a horse girly through and through, so when I see anything equestrian-wise I’m game. And this book did not disappoint.

I loved every moment of it and am looking forward to the next instalment.

Highly recommend.

I grabbed this book blind a while ago on Netgalley. I don't know why I waited so long to read it. This was a fun cozy mystery set in the prestigious world of an Elite Equestrian Center. The story was fast-paced with well-developed characters. It kept me guessing until the end!! Highly recommended!!

I received a complimentary digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Divas ’Til Death by Mary Curran is a fast-paced, quirky mystery with a blend of suspense and humor. Callie Kinsey, a determined TV reporter with a passion for horses, stumbles upon a murder that sets off a chain of events leading her into the upper echelons of the equestrian world. As she uncovers secrets and navigates a web of deceit, Callie must clear her name while investigating a string of murders linked to the elite stables. With witty dialogue, unexpected twists, and a determined heroine, this novel offers a fun and thrilling ride for fans of cozy mysteries with a touch of dark humor.

I need to preface my feedback with the fact that I am positively biased to anything that includes horses, and I loved any mention to anything equestrian related in the book.
Callie is a likable character, even with her lack of survival instinct, and I found myself rooting for her at every turn of the book.
The mystery was well built, with a good share of red herrings, and even thought you could predict who was the murderer for a portion of the book, there was still some plot twists in the end that made the whole read enjoyable.
I will be definitely looking forward to more stories coming from Callie.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for an ARC

I absolutely loved this book! A brilliant murder mystery - I didn’t see the murderer coming until it was revealed, so many twists and turns it kept you on your toes from start to finish! Couldn’t put the book down!

With her station recently sold and jobs on the line, Callie can’t believe the good fortune of stumbling across a dead body in a ditch. (“Good” strictly in a career-saving capacity, naturally.) The victim turns out to be a wealthy equestrian — the first of three who will ultimately be found strangled along the peaceful rolling pastures of prestigious Chanticleer Farms.

This was a very fun mystery. I look forward to more books starring Callie Kinsey!

Callie is worried about her job at the news station, if only a big story would break out and give them the ratings they need to keep her on.
Deaths will do, especially ones where Callie is always first on the scene.
In this equestrian themed murder mystery everyone is hiding secrets but who is the killer? Also contains little bit of romance! This is book 1 of the Callie Kinsey mystery series.

This was my first cowboy/ murder mystery book and I thoroughly enjoyed it, can’t wait for the rest of the series.

Didn’t read the blurb on this one so assumed it was a small town cowboy romance based on the cover! What I actually got was a small town, rich people murder mystery based around horse stables! Did not disappoint!
Callie is a news reporter about to lose her job, who finds herself right in the middle of a murder investigation when she finds a dead body on her way to ride her horse!
With everyone a suspect who will actually turn out to be the murderer?
Will Callie manage to keep her job at the station?
🌟🌟🌟🌟

An excellent start of a new cozy series: I had a lot of fun, appreciated the well rounded characters and the tightly knitted plot.
The solid mystery kept me guessing.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

I really enjoyed this book and all of its twists and turns. I honestly had no idea who I should be rooting for and who I should be against at any stage in this book. I’ve never read a murder mystery centered around a stables before so that was an aspect of the book that I really found interesting and captivating. I also found the hints of romance scattered throughout the book really enjoyable. I liked that there was also issues around sexism both in the workplace and in police investigations brought up in the book. I feel like this is an aspect to murder mysterys that isn’t often written about. The book was fast paced making it a quick, fun, easy read but at the same time it had my mind whirring trying to work out who the killer was. It was a perfect book to read between the many fantasies that I’ve been consuming recently.

you mean to tell me this was a debut novel and the author doesn’t have 15 more that i can buy right now and binge read??!?!? 😭 i will cry! this book was SO incredibly amazing that it possibly has put me into a reading slump because i. annoy get over it!

I was drawn to this book since it was based on the horse world. The descriptions of such high end horse boarding was interesting. I've stayed in some nice barns but none like that. This was an entertaining book. The ending was a bit of a stretch for me.

Divas ’Til Death by Mary Curran
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️


A perfect, cosy murder mystery, what you’d expect from a Hallmark movie, is the only way I can describe this book.

Callie Kinsey, the FMC, strays across a dead body while out hacking. From there it’s a race against time to figure out who did it while trying not to be the next victim herself.

A little fact about me, I’m a horse girly through and through, so when I see anything equestrian-wise I’m game. And this book did not disappoint.

I loved every moment of it and am looking forward to the next instalment.

Highly recommend.