This reads more like a police procedural with an amateur sleuth than a cozy mystery. There’s not a lot of character development, other than a data dump at the beginning that slows down the pace. The book never caught my interest, and I gave up before the 50% point. I suspect the book will appeal more to Brits than to Americans like me.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC.

This book is a first in a new series and was well written with a good plot and a good flow. The mystery was good, and fast paced and I would like to read more of Bella's adventures going forward. Out of all the characters Bella and John are the ones that actually stand out to me. Matt maybe.

The one thing I didn't like was that the author introduced way too many characters in the book, which meant that many suspects, and it just made the book way too long. I would have liked the book more if it would have been probably 10 chapters shorter.

I received an advance copy of the book and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Bella Winter has moved to the town of Hope Eaton to start her antiques business, but fate gets in the way when Professor Oliver Barton is murdered. It is soon discovered that he was hiding a treasure trove of secrets and suspicion soon falls on the villagers. Hope Eaton is a charming country town with many aspects of Midsomer Murders complete with nosey neighbours.
I enjoyed the fact that we were allowed inside Bella’s thoughts as she tried to find out who the killer was (and those meetings in the pub with her friends). The plot was well written with the method of murder carefully planted in the reader’s mind and the murderer not being too obvious.
Bella’s love of antiques shone through. It made me long to visit an antiques centre again. There are a lot of different characters in the book that I’m sure we will get to know about as the series goes on and I’m looking forward to hearing more about Bella’s life. I can see love for her on the horizon.

As I love the author's previous series of cosy mysteries, I had high expectations for this new one, and I'm now pleased to report I really enjoyed meeting Bella Winter and the other inhabitants of the new fictional location. And of course it was fun to try to guess what every suspect was hiding. I'll definitely read the next book too, as soon as it's available.

I'm an absolute sucker for cozy mysteries and thought this was a delightful addition to the genre. Bella's vintage vibe was a fun twist on the sometimes stereotypical cozy mystery female MC. I also enjoyed how the victim had ties to Bella's late father. The supporting characters were the right mix of quirky and charming and have me looking forward to their escapes in future books. The Antique Store Detective was a quick, fun read that I'm delighted to have read.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy.

Main character, Bella, seems like a likeable person. She is starting up her own antique store. On top of that, she gets drawn into a mysterious death of someone she vaguely knew. Bella is not overly happy with how the police are doing with the investigation. Along with her colleague, John, she starts her own investigation into what happened.
Bella’s father had been detective before he passed away. Will Bella take on his legacy?
The Antique Store Detective was a cozy murder mystery read. There are many plot twists that have you wondering where the story is going.

Thank you NetGalley, Bookouture and the author for the opportunity to read this book for my honest review. All opinions expressed are my own.

Bella Winter lives in Hope Eaton, where she runs an antique shop. She lives in the flat that was her late father’s.

When she discovers the body of Professor Oliver Barton in the grounds at Raven Hall, where she had spent the night, everyone believes it was an accident.

Bella’s work colleague, John, thinks there is more to his death. As Bella starts an investigation of her own, there are plenty of suspects to choose from.

This is a cozy murder mystery with plenty going on to keep you turning the pages.

I liked the characters and enjoyed the friendship between Bella and John.

I’m sure most of us enjoy trying to be an armchair detective - in my case, I rarely get it right! Plenty of twists to make me wonder which direction the story was taking me in.

My thanks to Bookouture and NetGalley for a copy in exchange for my honest review.

antiques, antiquity, small-business, small-town, murder, amateur-sleuth, cozy-mystery, local-law-enforcement, relatives, new-series, first-in-series, England****

I usually rave about this author's work and the depth of her characters, but there was just something missing for me. The plot was solid and the twists sneaky with an abundance of red herrings. I expected to love the main character but she was like "meh" for me. However. I really hope the next one will do it for me.
I requested and received a free temporary EARC from Bookouture via NetGalley.
#BellaWinterMysteriesBk1

It was good and entertaining, but there were something missing... Maybe more antiquity, and a lot of cosy missing?

The investigation was done well and the guilty one wasn't necessarily easy and quick to guess, and they weren't found quickly in the book as well. Explanations and reasons was clear, and the guilty one doesn't come out of nowhere, it still has links and hints you could have guessed during the whole investigation, so it's good! The story surrounding Pr. Barton's digging and objects he found was also interesting.

However, I felt like you only get that detective work, and there's barely any cosy side and not much of the antique store outside of it used as base for their board. We get basically only the investigation, and we don't get to know much about the MC themselves : there's no character depth for Bella, she's only known for her father, her store, her neighboor, and her investigation. The other characters helping her out in her detective work is even more blant than that, they're only here to help. We know more about a suspect's emotional states and her story deep down, than the main character in this book!

So the investigation was good, but everything aside was pretty much non-existant. It felt more like a simple whodunit detective book, than a cosy mystery one. All the cosy part was missing for me.

Antiques, archaeological finds and a mystery to solve? What's not to love? A cosy read that kept me guessing throughout.
I look forward to more of Bella Winter's adventures...and her vintage style!

The Antique Store Detective by Clare Chase is the first book that I have read by this author. An entertaining mystery set in a small village, Hope Eaton.

The characters were slowly developed throughout the book; but I admit I was confused by the intricate family connections with Bella's assistant, John. I would have liked to see more development of Bella and less focus on John and his family members. The pace of the story was smooth but a little too slow to hold my attention. An interesting setting with likable characters.

Having enjoyed the Eve Mallow series by this author, I was looking forward to this start of a new one, Bella Winter is a new resident of Hope Eaton, where she has opened a vintage and antique store. She had spent time as a child here with her late police detective father, a man she loved and learned from. When Bella stumbles across the body of a local professor she feels compelled to investigate herself when the local police believe the death was an accident, not murder as Bella believes. Using the lessons she learned from her father and the wide ranging family connections of her employee, John, Bella and crew sift through the lies and omissions of a whole cast of suspects before the last plot twist reveals the killer.
Overall I did enjoy the book, it was a bit slow and repetitive sometimes with a lot of characters and speculation as to their motives to keep track of, but the storyline of night hawks and how they worked kept me interested, as did Bella’s flair for vintage clothing (more of this in the next book please!), and the resolution was well done. Now that we’ve gotten to know Bella’s large group of fellow crime solvers I’m hoping the next in the series will move along a bit more quickly, I’ll be looking forward to it as I enjoyed Bella as a character. She’s intuitive, strong, principled and kind, a great combination. Thank you to NetGalley and Bookouture for an advance copy.

A lot of books usually either have a super good beginning or an amazing end. It's pretty rare for me to find one that has both but this defiantly had such a great beginning and all the way through pace that kept me wanting to keep reading like crazy. A great detective novel.

This was a fun cozy sort of mystery about a death in a small town of a historian who was sneaking out at night to dig for hidden treasures. Bella, owner of a an antique store and daughter of a former police chief, decides she needs to investigate the historian’s death because it doesn’t look like the accident the police seem to think it is. She gathers quite a few friends in the village to help her out and then she goes nosing around asking questions and following people at night. There is a lot of convenient eavesdropping or catching sight of someone doing something suspicious late at night that she gets to observe.

All the people that Bella’s groups considered seemed unlikely, but then I had trouble grasping what a terrible crime it was for someone to keep treasure that he had unearthed himself even if it was on someone else’s land. It’s the crime of “nighthawking” in Britain. I wasn’t familiar with that so I learned about that.

I enjoyed the book and look forward to reading future books in what looks like it will be a new series.

I voluntarily reviewed an advanced reader copy of this book that I received from Netgalley; however, the opinions are my own and I did not receive any compensation for my review.

The Antique Store Detective by Clare Chase is the first A Bella Winter Mystery. The author takes her time in setting the scene describing the village, the antique store, the manor home, and Bella’s apartment. We get to meet a host of characters when Bella goes to the pub or people come to her antique shop. I like that Bella is now living in the same apartment where her father resided. You can tell how much Bella cared for father. Bella finds a man dead who was nighthawking on the grounds of the local manor house. I had not heard of nighthawking previously, and it was interesting to learn about this practice. Bella along with her employee, John Jenks, dig into whodunit. Bella, of course, does not believe the police are up to the task. There are several suspects who have a motive. John appears to be be related to over half the village, which helps in obtaining information as well as questioning suspects. Of course, Bella retires to the pub to share the information she has learned with her friends. This leads to repetition of case details. While parts of the mystery were interesting, the solution was simple. There was a lack of action, suspense, and excitement. The ending felt incomplete. The story moved at a slow pace (snail’s move faster), and it was too long (375 pages). As the saying goes, The Antique Store Detective was not my cup of tea!

This book is set in the historical and picturesque English town of Hope Eaton, inspired by Bridgnorth in Shropshire. I loved this setting and could visualise walking around and exploring. Bella Winter owns an antiques shop called Vintage Winter, where she adores the items that she has on sale, wanting her customers to know the stories behind each object.

Her peaceful life in the town is overturned when she finds Professor Oliver Barton dead in the ruins of Raven Hall. Bella believes this to be a tragic accident until her co-worker John asks her to dig a little deeper as he believes that Oliver may have been murdered.

Bella puts together a group of friends (mainly from the Jenks family) and starts to investigate the possible suspects.

I liked the book as a whole, the descriptions of the town and the passion for antiques came across strong. I thought nighthawking was an interesting subject to be pursued in the book and it was fun learning about the ruins as the book went on.

The thing I struggled with the most was the sheer number of people involved in the investigation, how they were mostly related to one another and how repetitive it made the dialogue as things were often seen through Bella’s eyes and then discussed with the group. This slowed the pace of the book down for me.

I enjoyed the book, it was a good cosy crime mystery, especially the ending of the book, it was a twist that I did not expect. I would read other books in the series to see how the relationships develop between the characters.

Thank you NetGalley and Bookouture for sending this book for review, all opinions are my own.

This was a new author and the start of a new series for me, perfect timing. Bella is an interesting MC. She is sharp, has definite style, and I love her antique shop as a backdrop. I think the author could have filled her out a bit more. She is a tad one dimensional. We see glimpses of emotion underneath, but mostly, we just get smarts. Bella moves to Hope Eaton as she had spent time here, with her Dad, a police detective, as a child. She opens her antique store and has started to settle in, making friends and finding her way around. When a local professor is found dead, outside of the home of an acquaintance where Bella had spent the night, she is surprised that the police are not taking it as a suspicious death when so many things point that way. Bella, with the help of her father's retired police friend, her employee at the antiques store, John, and various of his family members make it their business to find out what really happened. This was a very interesting mystery, with lots of viable candidates for the evil deeds and a conclusion that definitely makes sense. I will definitely look forward to more in this series! Thanks to #NetGalley and #Bookouture for the opportunity to meet Bella and company. #TheAntiqueStoreDetective, #ClaireChase, #bookreview, #bookideas, #retiredreader

Bella is staying the night with friends of her mother when she uncovers a dead body the next morning, with ties to her late father. With her collegues Bella works to uncover if the death of Professor Oliver Barton was truly an accident.

I had high hopes for this novel, the plot reminded me of The Thursday Murder Club however I was unable to get into the plot. While nicely written it was hard for me to get into the book, the beginning felt like a lot of set up and it was hard to keep track of all the new characters and relations being introduced. It honestly just did not grab me.

Clare Chase’s The Antique Store Detective is described as “a completely unputdownable cozy murder mystery”. Ummm….

Bella runs a small antique stall in a shared building. Her stay with her mum’s friends at a local manor house ends with her finding the body of a local historian in their grounds as she drives out. As always in such books, she insists that the local police won’t find the murderer and she must do it herself, roping in her trusty (but very reluctant) assistant from the shop, John. I did like the (for once, reasonable rationale) behind her belief: Barry, the detective, has four children under seven; his wife is a vet who is out at all hours and makes Barry assist her when he’s off duty.

It turns out John is related to half the population of the village and I think this caused my attention to wane. Did so many characters really have to be related to him? Did the relationship (brother, sister - or was it sister-in-law? - mother, niece, schoolfriend, teacher) matter? A glance at another mystery I’ve just completed shows that The Antique Store Detective is 30% longer – and I’m afraid it feels like a lot more. The writing is competent and the plot is OK; but the characters aren’t terribly interesting and the book just drags – sorry!

Thank you, NetGalley and Bookouture, for the opportunity to have a free copy for review. I’m sure that many, many other readers will love the book because it is the archetypal cosy murder mystery, but the novel and I just didn’t hit it off.
#TheAntiqueStoreDetective #NetGalley

I have enjoyed both of Clare Chase’s previous series and so I was excited to be approved for the first book in a new cosy crime series.
I really loved the beginning of this mystery when we first meet Bella and her broken boiler. She is a likeable character and the antique shop background is done really well. Her love for the antiques that she sells shines through and I can clearly visualise some of the pieces described. The scenes in the antique shop felt very real especially the descriptions of the customer’s behaviour. The woman who walked round, picking things up with no real intention of buying anything reminded me of myself when I wander around shops.
The mystery is an interesting one and tied up with the hobby of night hawking where the participants steal onto private land using metal detectors to search for treasure that they can sell illegally. The idea of the four cards representing four different women was an interesting one although I’m not sure how much it added to the plot.
Sadly, I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as the author’s earlier books. None of the characters really came to life for me in the way that the author’s previous protagonists have. I think that this is possibly due to the sheer number of people Bella gathers around her to help in her quest to find the murderer.
The mystery is well plotted and has plenty of suspect as well as lots of twists and reveals but it all seemed a bit formulaic. I felt that there was an over reliance on meetings at the local pub and café to share findings.
Despite my negative points, The Antique Store Detective was still an entertaining read and I’m grateful as always to the publishers, Bookouture, and Net Galley for providing this ARC in exchange for my honest opinions.