playing good copse

When Alice moved to the Cotswolds from London with her partner Joe to start a family, she wasn’t sure what to expect. She certainly didn’t expect to solve a murder with her prenatal group. And now that their babies are all a little over a year old, Alice didn’t expect to find herself chained to a tree in the middle of the night, but there she is.

While the new moms, babies, and dogs were on a picnic in the beautiful countryside, a naked couple walked past. They were painted and clearly ready to protest, so the new moms asked them about the protest. There was a local energy company that was planning on setting up a wind farm in the field where they were picnicking, despite it being a copse of 500-year-old chestnut trees. Raven and Leila, the protestors, explained that they were going to a photo shoot to try to raise awareness and invited the new moms to a meeting of their group, Earth Force.

While Alice loves the time she gets to spend with her baby Jack, she is also looking forward to an evening with grown-ups. She’s expecting a meeting where she can eat some cookies and maybe help paint a sign or two. And that’s what she finds. But somehow she also gets roped into participating in the protest, where the group is chaining themselves to trees to get their point across.

The company that they are protesting against is Aether, and it’s run by tech guru Owen Myers, who wants to create avenues for renewable energy. But the fact that he’s choosing to destroy this valuable green space makes Alice wonder if he really is dedicated to saving the planet. It’s clear that she’s not the only one questioning him when someone firebombs his house.

But it’s not until Alice finds herself chained to a tree, noticing as the sun comes up in the morning, that she’s sitting across from a woman slumped against her tree that she realized just how dark this fight had gotten. Because that woman was Leila, and she was clearly no longer alive. The protest ends suddenly as the police show up to start investigating, and Alice can’t seem to stop herself from doing a little investigating herself.

Alice and her new mom friends use their resourcefulness and their contacts to find out that Leila wasn’t who she presented to Earth Force. She had worked for Owen previously, and she had kept her family and their secrets to herself. But she wasn’t the only one in the group with secrets, and the new moms keep poking around until they uncover them all and unearth a killer.

With an adorable baby, exhaustion, Baywatch reruns, junk food, and a goofball dog named Helen, Alice takes on a second murder investigation in her sleepy Cotswold community in Dead Tired. Author Kat Ailes brings back together this group of new moms and all the challenges of the first year of motherhood along with the challenges of trying to solve a murder in this charming, sleepy murder mystery.

I loved Dead Tired, and not just because I resonate with that title. (No kids, just really tired.) But these books are filled with a big cast of interesting and diverse characters (some are dogs) and much talk of tasty snacks, which I am all for. While I have read the first book and had been introduced to the new moms already, it made for a especially large number of characters to keep track of, especially once you add in all the Earth Force members. I did struggle to keep everyone straight, but aside from that, I just had so much fun with this book. I can’t wait to see what kind of trouble the Expectant Detectives run into next.

Egalleys for Dead Tired were provided by Minotaur Books through NetGalley, with many things.