Murder at Gull’s Nest, Jess Kidd
When you think of ‘cosy crime,’ you might picture amateur sleuths in quaint villages, a victim who’s often the villain, and a satisfying ending where justice prevails. These familiar parameters have long defined the subgenre, one that is usually considered the lesser sibling to police procedurals, hard-boiled noir, psychological thrillers, or espionage. Cosy crime is frequently, and unfairly, labelled as literary comfort food: predictable, low-stakes, and a little bit twee.
But to write off the genre as small-scale escapism is to underestimate its capacity for quiet, but no less impactful, subversion. The best examples use their deceptively gentle frameworks to smuggle in sharp social commentary, hiding radical critique beneath tea trays, village fetes, and tightly curled perms. Agatha Christie did it with class anxiety; Dorothy L. Sayers with gender politics; and more recently, Janice Hallett and Richard Osman have reimagined the formula with metafictional twists and sly humour. Hallett has reimagined the stylisation of the genre by embracing multi-media storytelling formats, proving that cosy crime is not stuck in the past but ready to evolve. These examples pay homage to the golden age of detective fiction and prove that underestimating the genre is to overlook its potential as a disruptive tool. After all, what exactly is ‘cosy’ about murder?
Enter Murder at Gulls Nest, the first in Jess Kidd’s new seaside mystery series. Her latest fictional foray doesn’t upend the cosy crime genre and shows no interest in reinventing it by dramatically tearing up the rule book. Instead, Kidd recalibrates it ever so slightly by balancing charm with sinister, melancholic, and radical undertones, as seen in her cross-genre, gothic literary fiction Things in Jars and The Night Ship. Kidd injects her trademark lyricism and sense of the uncanny into the cold, bleak setting of Gore-on-Sea, a washed-out 1950s coastal town, with the arrival of one very peculiar stranger. And it is here that our story begins.
Our unlikely protagonist is the delightful and formidable Nora Breen, comparable to the likes of Miss Marple and Murder, She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher. A recently dehabited nun, Nora, checks into the crumbling boarding house, Gulls Nest, under a vague pretext. Nora is on a mission to find her missing friend, Freda, and does so with the quietude honed from 30 years of living in a convent. It is this uniqueness that makes our amateur detective a formidable observer, and unsurprisingly, she soon starts to unravel the secrets of Gulls Nest - including the sudden deaths of some of its lodgers.
Like Miss Marple and the contemporary Agatha Raisin, Nora is underestimated. Where Marple weaponised others’ assumptions and Raisin wielded her outsiderness with flamboyance, Nora retreats into the shadows, walking the very fringes of not only Gulls Nest, but also the lives of its residents. Nora has a talent for seeing what others miss. Her skills are less about deduction and more about discipline, watchfulness, and intuition. Kidd intelligently plays with the paradox that silence is a form of power. In many ways, Murder at Gulls Nest is less about the ‘who’ of the mystery and more about the ‘how’ of seeing.
Kidd builds tension not through jump scares or gruesome deaths, but through atmosphere, psychology, and the subtle unravelling of secrets. The pacing of the novel is steady, allowing readers to immerse themselves in the characters and the setting. The boarding house residents aren’t caricatures. They’re richly drawn, flawed, and deeply human. Their secrets aren't always sinister; some are simply tender, shameful, or painful to admit. Each has their own authentic flaws that readers can relate to: love, loneliness, trauma, isolation, a sense of never quite fitting in, of being an outcast. Each individual has something to hide. However, each eccentric character is drawn with care and with compassion, even when their motives are murky. It’s a sensitive exploration of how the most unlikely people can come together and then fall apart at the same time.
The novel is set against post-war Britain’s grey coastlines, and Murder at Gulls Nest is as much about the social fabric of its time as it is about solving a crime. Kidd's exploration of post-war Britain's social dynamics is not just a backdrop, but a thought-provoking element that adds depth to the narrative.
Kidd plays the long game with tone. While there are flashes of humour, this is no parody. Her language is elegant and precise, and her world is carefully crafted, but never whimsical. Gore-on-Sea is decaying; its facade and grey-lit coastline feel metaphorically loaded, and at times, we can even taste the salt of the sea and the mouldy wallpaper paste of the boarding house ourselves. This is a town where time has slowed, where ‘stiff upper lip’ meets post-traumatic disorder. Silence, ironically, echoes the loudest through the book - not just in the hushed tones of the convent, but also in the social suppression of mid-century Britain: what is not said at the dinner table, the absences in polite conversation, the side-eye glances, and the unspoken rules that prioritise appearances over truth. In this sense, Kidd’s novel feels deeply contemporary, echoing modern conversations around conformity, shame, and chosen identity. It also begs the question: has Nora simply swapped one institution of silence for another?
It would be amiss of me not to mention how well Kidd uses Nora’s past as a nun as something more than ornamental, but as a shaping force of the very fabric of her character. Yes, Nora is sharp, observant, methodical, and persistent, but she is also delightfully human. Nora has moments of uncertainty and self-doubt as she wrestles with the shadows of her own lived experiences. The residents of Gulls Nest never truly know the real Nora Breen until much later in the book. But this is OK because Nora doesn’t even know herself.
Intelligent, perceptive, and wonderfully wry, Nora is a woman learning to navigate a foreign world in the most obscure of circumstances. Her journey toward selfhood, after decades of prescribed devotion, is as compelling as the mystery she’s trying to solve. Whether she’s playfully breaking the rules, taking joy in the mundane, or confronting her own limits, she is an amateur detective forged not from brilliance but from discipline, empathy, and a soft rebellion. Nora begins to view herself as a woman, rather than just a servant of God, as she breaks free from her long-housed chrysalis and enters an era of transformation.
Needless to say, Murder at Gulls Nest arrives with a bang. With fiendish plotting and deliciously macabre humour, this story doesn’t fight against its inevitable cosy crime categorisation because it doesn’t need to. Instead, it grips the genre with both hands and stretches it, showing the emotional and thematic range alternative crime fiction can offer. It’s what happens when literary fiction steps into play not with irony, but with reverence and curiosity.
Thoroughly enjoyable, Murder at Gulls Nest is an elegant and enthralling prelude to something that certainly has legs. It has all the hallmarks of a great whodunit: an atmospheric setting, a cast of deliciously suspicious characters, and a slow, satisfying build. But it is also a novel with literary ambition and emotional heft. Think The Thursday Murder Club dashed with a touch of noir, or Agatha Christie meets Tessa Hadley, where the crime is the door, not the destination.
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