Murder Most Unladylike (2014) by Robin Stevens

🕵️‍♀️🕵️‍♀️ I came upon this series accidentally when hunting for a fun Christmassy book to read in 2021 I picked up Mistletoe and Murder at that time (5th of the series), and loved the idea of two schoolgirls becoming amateur sleuth, that I decided to read through the series from the beginning. It pays off, because this first book is even better than the 5th!

🕵️‍♀️🕵️‍♀️ Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong are two students in a boarding school called Deepdean School for Girls, a British respectable school where many wealthy and prominent parents sent their daughters. Daisy, a bossy confident pretty blonde, is one of them. Hazel, on the contrary, is a Hong Kong girl sent by her ambitious father to get a good education he never had. Like most Asian girls, Hazel feels alone and inferior to find herself among these snobbish English girls. It's heartbreaking to see how further she could go just to be accepted into them. Lucky for her, Daisy, though rather selfish and overly confident, saw Hazel's intelligence, and brought her under her wings, so to speak.

🕵️‍♀️🕵️‍♀️ The story begins with the two girls founding a Detective Society. Daisy as President (of course🤷🏻‍♀️), Hazel the Secretary. Hence, the book is written as a casebook, which made Hazel much like Watson to Holmes, or Hastings to Poirot. It was Hazel who first found, by accident, the corpse of their Science teacher, Miss Bell, in the gymnasium - apparently fallen from the balcony. However, when Hazel returned several minutes later with Daisy and their prefect, the corpse wasn't there! The prefect thought Hazel lied, but Daisy trusted her. When the next day the Headmistress or the other teachers said nothing about Miss Bell's absence, the two girls knew it's up to them to investigate the murder, because they're the only ones who knew that there was a murder.

🕵️‍♀️🕵️‍♀️ If you think that doing detective works inside a boarding school is almost impossible, think again! Daisy and Hazel have the biggest advantage because they are the only ones who knew that there's a murder (except the murderer, of course). What they need to do is to mingle with other students and... just listen to the gossips. Sooner rather than later, they got facts about where the teachers were at the time of murder and which had possibilities or alibis.

🕵️‍♀️🕵️‍♀️ However, when they were near the end of the case, things got more and more dangerous for them, that the murderer was more desperate. Solving a crime might not be so difficult for two intelligent schoolgirls, but how can they solve the case alone? In the end, this is such an unexpectedly brilliant murder mystery, cleverly written, with a well proportioned lines between school life lightness and dangerous action. And if a debut in the series is this promising, who could resist reading the rest? I couldn't!

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2