Clare "Kirby" Cornell finds herself working at a holiday resort for singles. As she gets to experience daily sunshine and an unlimited breakfast buffet, things could be worse. The fact that she's 30 and not working in her chosen career, journalism, is something that she is able to avoid thinking about, at least most of the time. Then one day she gets a message in an old, defunct group chat. The message is from her former flatmate Esme, but it can't be because Esme has been dead for a year. The previous year, Kirby and her three friends were sharing a flat in an old building in the small village of Crowhurst. The fifth person who rents a room with them is away for work. The new girl, Esme, suddenly turns up and claims she's subletting the empty room until their friend returns. She does have a key to the building, so the other roommates have no reason to doubt her story. She soon announces that she's there to look into a murder spree that happened in the village 30 years ago. Every year, the village has a festival where someone dressed as a crow is pelted with "stones" in an homage to a past where a good harvest was vital. During the festival 30 years previously, the man chosen to dress as a crow stabbed 5 teenagers to death before leaping off a cliff and killing himself. When a body was recovered from the sea, it was too badly damaged to positively identify, but everyone assumed it was the killer, and life went on as before. Esme, who has a large social media following, goes around the country looking into crime, disappearance, and other mysterious cases. She claims some of her followers, the "Watsons" have found something is not quite right about the whole story surrounding the massacre. The night she arrives, Esme is live streaming as she attempts to question a witness about the case when she appears to be abducted. The police don't think there is anything to investigate, as Esme is an adult and no one else seems to be concerned about her. Kirby, who has left her job in London after some sort of scandal, is working for the tiny local newspaper and is eager to cover a story that doesn't involve boring council meetings or street repair issues. As the yearly festival draws closer, Kirby has to find out what happened to Esme as well as continue working on the original story -- is the killer from so long ago back for more mayhem?

This story had a lot of really funny moments. It was hard to figure out who was behind the murders and what everyone was hiding. The crow symbolism was a bit overdone (people in the village were forever exclaiming things like, "Thank Crow it's not supposed to rain on Saturday!"), but overall, this was a fun mystery to try to untangle!