I think I’ve fallen in love with cozy mysteries that have a romantic element to them. They just feel like the perfect escapist reads lately and I’m living for finding new ones!

Moke has created a great setting with our main character arriving at a secluded island to a massive property where her ex-boyfriend is getting married. Yep, all the drama is definitely inevitable from that start! I really loved how the house and property became so intricate to the plot.

There’s mystery and tension and romance all blended together in this story, which I think will make it appealing for a wide audience of readers. The characters are likable and complex enough for the reader to become invested in how things will turn out.

Fun, entertaining, and perfect popcorn reading!

I absolutely loved reading this book. Kate's character is relatable, funny, awkward, intelligent, frustrating, and fun. She starts of so strong with jumping on to the ferry that's leaving the dock. It's the perfect metaphor for who Kate is as a person and just how much of a whirlwind the upcoming wedding weekend and stay on Hempstead Island will be.
Everything about the murders, the clues, and sleuthing was so enticing. All the details and Kate's interactions with the other characters really draw you into the story and make you not want to put the book down.
I also love Kate with Jake so much. Watching them fumble their words (and clothes) trying to understand their feelings and the fear of losing each other. It was frustrating but very worth it watching them figure out how to communicate as a couple. So glad i was able to get an ARC from netgalley for this one!

2.5- 3 stars ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

This story follows mystery author Kate who writes her own bestselling mysteries that attends a wedding on an island with a family who is all attending her ex boyfriend’s wedding to rich heiress Kennedy. Don’t forget to add in a super hot post injury surfer named Jake which the love interests in her famous Loretta mysteries is based after.

This poses a potential knives out tale without the mystery or suspense much involved. The exploration of the mansion was fun, but I found it quite odd how most of the characters seem wholly unaffected by the happenings this weekend. The pacing dragged for me at most times, despite it being an easy read. I had trouble connecting to the writing style overall.

It was a decent story overall, but I wouldn’t say it is a book you HAVE to try. It uses romance subplot, ex drama, and who—dunit family style prose.

Thank you NetGalley, St. Martin's Press , Minotaur Books, and Jenny the author for this free e copy in exchange for my honest review!

A combination of a murder mystery dinner and the game clue. A story about a detective murder writer who was invited to a wedding on a secluded island where not only one of her exs shows up but two and one just so happens to be the groom to the women he cheated on her with. But that's not all there's an attempted murder and an actual murder of an heiress who just announced she's basically turning over the family fortune to a historical society.

I received this ARC from publishers via Netgalley
#Netgalley

Kate Valentine is a best-selling author of the Loretta Starling mystery series who also happens to be attending her ex-fiancé and editor's wedding on a private island off of Seattle. Everything is awkward because he is marrying a publicist from the publishing house they are both a part of and Kate is way past her book deadline. She figures since she is going to the wedding, she can also finish up some semblance of her next novel using the private island and mansion as a backdrop. While Kate is making a mad leap onto the last boat going to the island, she realizes that her old friend and biggest romantic regret, Jake Hawkins, is on the boat with her.

With a storm that is now threatening the island and its inhabitants, a murder happens that bears similarity to one of the plots in her Loretta books and there are many suspects, including Kate herself. Kate, envisioning what Loretta would do, seeks out to find the murderer(s) with Jake, who is fast becoming even more important to Kate.

I loved the dynamic between Kate and Jake even amongst their perceived awkwardness with each other. I liked the locked room/ island and the clues throughout scattered through the book. The pacing was a little slower than I would have liked but I was entertained for most of the book.

Thanks to NetGalley, St. Martin's Press, and Minotaur Books for this eARC. She Doesn't Have a Clue is out now.

A delightful blend of whodunnit and rom-com.

Kate Valentine is a successful writer with three best-selling Loretta Starling novels to her names, plus a few others ghost written under pseudonyms. She’s also a bit of a hot mess – if there’s someone who will say the most in appropriate thing during the wedding rehearsal or catch her heel and managed to knock the bride into a pile of presents, it’s Kate. Oh, she also has a habit of slipping at any time into seeing the situation from Loretta’s much more competent and outgoing point of view.

So when her ex-fiancé (and current editor) invites her to his lavish wedding on the private island of his bride-to-be’s family, her first thought (and second and probably third) is to decline, until she receives a personal invitation from his fiancée’s aunt, Rebecca Hempstead (aka the B*ch Bull of Wall Street who managed to take her family’s fortune from smuggling booze and increase it tenfold). And one does not decline invitations from Rebecca.

Kate manages to just make the ferry to the island when she realizes that the person she checked and double checked wasn’t going to be there was there: charming, hot as hell Jake Hawkins. She and Jake had worked on a couple of ‘Wandering Australian’ travelog books together until Kate had a bit too much to drink and was a bit unprofessional. And like any good romance, Jake’s been flagged as Kate’s plus one, meaning they will be sharing accommodations, etc. for the wedding. All is going well (or as well as can be at your ex’s wedding) when Kate stumbles over the bride’s body, arranged in a similar setting as one of her books, she decides to channel her inner Loretta and solve the case.

Fun, fun, fun, fun! I loved Kate and how she managed to always do or say the most in appropriate thing. The setting was lovely as well – a homage to Golden Age mysteries with the party on a remote island, isolated by the storm of the century. Everyone’s got a secret or motive for wanting the bride dead, from the writers upset at the changes she’s made at their publishing company to the cousin more interested in developing the island into a resort than the wedding to the other cousin who’s drowning in debt from her hush-puppy food truck and wanting to get re-inherited. It was also a nice blend between romance and mystery; a number of books I’ve read lean one way or the other two much.

Highly recommended! I received a copy of this from NetGallley.com that I voluntarily reviewed.

A cute locked room mystery and rom-com! Was it predictable? Yeah, but I enjoyed it! I also had the audio and the narrator was great with all the different characters.

Murder mystery rom com
As a.murder mystery writer kate takes the events of a wedding she's invited to personally.
Easy to read but kind of drags i think. Not really a lot of happenings.

I love cozy mysteries and I don't mind a little romance in them - actually, most of the series I read have the main character either dating or married. So I thought a cozy rom-com mystery might be cute. What I don't read a lot of are romance novels because I don't care for the sex scenes.

I loved the mystery in this book. It is a locked-door murder mystery but it involves family and coworkers which always offers a lot of motives and secrets. I also thought it was fun to have a cozy murder writer to be the sleuth in the story.

I liked the characters. I had trouble remembering Jake was supposed to be Australian as his dialogue didn't have any Australian slang or speech patterns. I liked Jake and Kate together. It is sort of an enemies-to-lovers romance. They were friends when working on Jake's books but a misunderstanding drove them apart (the wedge between them may have been widened by Kate's editor who she dated for a while).

As long as the book focused on the mystery, I loved it. However, I didn't like it when it veered into descriptive foreplay and eventual sex. It just isn't my cup of tea. However, if you want a steamy cozy mystery then you will love it.

Because of these sexual detours, I grew bored with the story around the 75% mark and I just wanted to have the mystery solved. And when it did come to solving the mystery in the end it was just kind of rushed in the reveal but it did make sense.

This book was cute! Second chance romance meets cozy mystery complete with a cast of eccentric characters stuck on a remote island during a storm.

Mystery writer Kate Valentine travels to remote Hempstead Island for the wedding of her ex, who also happens to be her editor. En route to the wedding destination, she is reunited with long lost love, extreme adventurer Jake Hawkins. Filled with intrigue, red herrings, secret passageways, steamy encounters, and more… She Doesn’t Have a Clue is a fun, enjoyable read.

Being from the Pacific Northwest myself, I loved that this was set in the San Juan Islands. All the Seattle and Washington references made it extra fun for me.

Thank you Minotaur Books and NetGalley for the gifted copy.

This was a super fun murder mystery/rom com. Plenty of crazy moments, zany characters, suspects and murder! Definitely a favorite read for me!

This cozy mystery blends closed circle murder with second chance romance. Kate Valentine stands out as a heroine the reader instantly gets behind and roots to both catch the murderer and bag her Australian Hottie. I did figure out the murderer and plot by about 30%, which is quite early for a mystery. However, I believe Moke's intention was not to hold out the true villian till the end, but to carry the reader along the hijinks 0f the weekend along with Kate and Jake. The story has little true tension and thrill, but the mystery is fun and interesting nonetheless.

This was kinda hard to understand. Between the synopsis and the prologue, you really don't know what's going on or what the book is about. Turns out it is a Murder Mystery book. An author was mysteriously invited to her exe's elite wedding. She is a big-time author, and he is her publisher. Things start happening to the family to ruin the wedding and kill off the family entirely. The incidents are all excerpts from the author's book. The FMC, her situationship, and frenemy must work together to figure out what's going on before it's too late.

Loved the cover!

Romance:
So....... the romance gets hot and heavy out of nowhere, just drops on you. Suggested age would be 18+
Spice: 3 or 4 out of 5 

Reaction:
Like I said before, it was hard to pin out what exactly the book was going to be about. It can be confusing. Also, there are a lot of points where you will question "Why?" and "What does this matter?" The author has really fluffy writing. The author continuously adds personal issues and wedding issues to where the reader loses focuses of what is happening.

This was a cozy, whodunit read! I loved the banter and chemistry between Jake and Kate, but the mystery I wanted a little more suspense in trying to figure out who did it! Overall this was an enjoyable read, but it definitely gave more Hallmark vibes on a private island than anything.

I would still recommend to people! 3.5/5 stars!

Kate is headed to a wedding on a swanky private island - but it's not just anyone getting married. She didn't want to go to the wedding, but when the owner of the private island sent her a personalized invite, she felt that she had to go. Kate is a writer of mystery novels, and the groom, her ex-fiance, is also her editor. Kate suddenly becomes a suspect when she literally stumbles over the body of the bride. But thankfully, the bride isn't dead, but when the bride's aunt, the owner of the estate, and controller of the family purse-strings ends up dead, everyone seems to be a suspect. Kate, and Jake, her old crush, try to solve the mystery before someone else ends up dead...

This was a fun book to read, as Kate tries to play detective while using her "sleuthing" skills. Kate seems to be the prime suspect, as many of the events during the wedding weekend parallel - maybe a little too closely - events in Kate's novels. "She Doesn't Have a Clue" is out now!

Thanks to NetGalley and the Publisher for the Advanced Reader Copy of this title!

This was a cute book! I feel like there could have been some more character development towards the beginning because I couldn’t seem to keep track of who was who. Good plot and loved the ending of the story. It kept you wondering until the end what was going on.

I thought this was gonna be a cute cozy mystery......i guess it was cute. i guess there was a mystery. but the characters were a bit boring. no one seemed to care what was going on around them. it seemed strange. like it was written very carefree. hello.....someone is dead lol!! the whole thing just seemed bizarre to me.

4 ⭐️
2 🌶️

Thank you St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for the ebook ARC for She Doesn't Have a Clue by Jenny Elder Moke.

I seriously had my sleuth hat on when reading this book! And I must admit that Ms. Jenny Elder Moke won this time. I did not guess the killer! I gasped several times in this book. It had me on the edge of my seat! I also loved the element of romance! It was not just a "Oh, I think I like you." kinda book....it was an actual romance book! There was a 50 mystery and 50 romance element which I completely appreciated.

This book is about Kate Valentine, a mystery author that is not able to start her next installment of her mystery book series. And the hero of her books, is based on an Australian author that she had a crush on when she first started writing her books. She's currently on an island, attending her ex-boyfriend's (her editor) wedding and she's thrown into a plus-one without warning. But her plus-one is none other than the Australian author, Jake Hawkins. The mystery continues after she finds a dead body and who can help her solve the mystery but Jake and her book heroine, Loretta!

It was a quick, cute cozy mystery with a dash of romance.

This story was an fun story from an author I don’t know or haven’t read before! Will look at finding other things by this author. I am grateful for the early access, thank you to those that allowed it!

Would you attend your ex-fiance’s wedding? What about if it was held on a lavish, remote island off the coast of Seattle? Your ears might perk up a bit at the second offer.

This is the exact position that Kate Valentine finds herself in. Not only is it her ex-fiance, but it’s also her editor. And when she finds herself thrown into the plot of one of her mystery novels, with a poisoned bride, dead body, and evidence hidden in her room, Kate realizes she has bigger issues than just the wedding itself. If you’re looking for something to satisfy both your murder mystery AND romance craving, this book has it all.

Which, generally would be up my alley, but I really struggled to enjoy this book. I had to check several times to see if it was part of a series, and I don’t think it is, but the way the plot and characters were introduced made it feel like it should be. It really seemed like we were dropped into the middle of a storyline without any backstory, characters were introduced without any explanation as to who they were, it just felt very strange and not cohesive.

With this, some of the tension between characters didn’t have the same umph that would have made this book enjoyable. When Kate and her love interest get together, I audibly said “woah, woah, wait WHAT?!” I knew they were love interests based on the synopsis, but I don’t know, it felt strange.

This book had a lot of promise, but unfortunately it just fell a bit short for me when it came to delivery. And if I am a complete idiot and this really is part of a series (wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done that), then I take back everything I said about it being disjointed.