I made a few mistakes with J.M. Hall’s A Clock Stopped Dead. First, I thought this cozy British mystery was the first in the series featuring retired teachers Pat, Liz, and Thelma. It’s actually the third. A Spoonful of Murder is the first. I guess my biggest mistake was plunging into a mystery featuring three women, all about sixty, only to discover it was hard to tell them apart, and even more difficult to remember all of their male family members. All the women seemed to be having problems with their sons. I should have made a list of characters.

Pat, Liz, and Thelma meet once a week at the Thirsk Garden Centre Cafe. After Marquerite McAllister has an unexplained incident in the dense fog, the three women decide they need to investigate. Marguerite once worked with Pat, and twenty years after an affair with the man who fixed the school’s photocopier, she’s still obsessed with him. When the trio hear about Marguerite’s latest obsession, at first they think that’s just Marguerite. While waiting for a late train, she went looking for a restroom, wandering in the fog. She came across what seemed to be an other worldly shop with men’s wear and a clock stuck at ten to three. When she went back the next day to what she thought was a charity shop, the entire shop had vanished.

The trio of retirees decide to investigate, although Thelma, the wife of an ordained vicar, doesn’t believe in the supernatural. As they ask questions, they come across a young woman whose sister just died in a car crash just after Marguerite’s experience in the fog. They take her under their wing, only to discover connections to a house where “Mad Stanley” and his first and second wives lived. Both women died in car crashes, including the latest one who died in the fog.

While the Stanley house is described as a “said, empty house”, I felt that way about the lives of the three amateur sleuths, sad, empty lives. Thelma is angry at her husband because he’s happy in a job delivering packages. Pat doesn’t want to turn sixty, and she’s easily set off by the smallest thing. Pat and Liz are both dealing with adult children who return home.

I was anticipating what others referred to as a witty, funny mystery. It’s not. A Clock Stopped Dead for everyone in this book, at a time when they’re leading sad, unhappy lives.

A Clock Stopped Dead by J.M. Hall. Avon, 2024. ISBN 9780008606923 (paperback), 336p.

FTC Full Disclosure – I received a galley through NetGalley to review for a journal.