Another reader commented that they weren’t sure Veronica Bond could sustain a series with the Dinner and a Murder Mystery theme. I’m not sure either, but I found the first in the series, Death in Castle Dark, to be a fun, engaging book with a charming amateur sleuth. Fans of the gothic romances from the 1970s might want to try this one that celebrates the tropes.

Nora Blake is an actor who interviews for a job at Castle Dark, an actual castle in Wood Glen, Illinois. Derek Corby, the owner, hires real actors and has elegant dinners catered to provide paying guests with a total immersion mystery experience. The guests are all “Inspectors” who receive badges and notebooks to interview the actors who play roles in a mystery play. The Inspectors guess “whodunnit”. The actors receive pay, room and board in the castle, and the opportunity to play varying roles because the mysteries are changed every couple months.

Nora loves her beautifully decorated room on the third floor of the castle, and it isn’t long before she begins to feel as if the other cast members are family. And, she finds the gardener, John, attractive, even though their conversation seems a little odd. But, she’s only there two weeks when, in the middle of one of the dinner productions, Nora loses an earring. When she searches for it, she finds the body of a fellow actor in the chapel.

Because she found the body, and tells the police about the castle’s hidden passages, someone might be watching Nora. When she picks up Victoria Holt’s Mistress of Mellyn, a gothic romance, she finds the eerie atmosphere a little too close to home. It isn’t long before Nora finds herself in the middle of her own gothic adventure.

Author Veronica Bond, a pseudonym, describes Death in Castle Dark as a cozy-gothic. It’s actually a delightful cozy mystery with an appealing cast, and a marvelous castle setting. Those of us who always loved the gothic trope of an isolated mansion or castle, a young woman who is victimized, and the romantic suspense, will appreciate Death in Castle Dark. For me, the drama of a mystery theater cast just added to the pleasure. Can Bond sustain a long-running series? I’m willing to watch her give it a try.

Death in Castle Dark by Veronica Bond. Berkley Prime Crime, 2021. ISBN 9780593335871 (paperback), 270p.

FTC Full Disclosure – I bought a copy of the book.