Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Bookouture, and author Helena Dixon for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

The Seaside Murders is the second book in author Helena Dixon’s The Secret Detective Agency series. Although I have not read the first book in the series, I had no issues understanding what was going on in this book. Set during the Second World War, the series follows the adventures of Jane Treen, who works for the British Government managing spies. Her boss, Brigadier Remmington-Blythe, asks her to travel to her home area of Kent and look into the body of a POW that was found on the beach there, as well as reported black market activity in the area.

This enables her to reunite with handsome and shy Arthur Cilento, who is a codebreaker with the government who worked with Jane in the previous book. He travels to Jane’s childhood home with his manservant, Benson. Benson is one of the most interesting characters in the book. He hovers over Arthur, helping him deal with severe asthma that threatens to debilitate him. At the same time, he has a sense of adventure that could potentially get him in trouble at times.

Things have changed in the town Jane grew up in, and she doesn’t know a number of the people living there. A POW camp is nearby and leases out low-risk prisoners to work at the surrounding farms, with the men off fighting in the War. After being out for the day, one of the POWs fails to return. His body is found on the beach. It’s believed that he drowned, but there are several things that lead Jane and Arthur to question that ruling.

As they investigate, they are also on the trail of black marketers posing as government agents who rob various establishments following air raids. Slowly, they uncover secrets in the town. To complicate matters further, Jane’s actress mother arrives at the house after being bombed out of her flat in London.

I found The Seaside Murders hard to get into. Jane doesn’t seem terribly likable at first, and that was a big part of it. Arthur is actually her subordinate, and though she doesn’t lord that over him, it’s a source of tension with outsiders during the investigation. Jane shows little regard for Arthur’s medical issues. It’s written almost as if his asthma is a source of amusement for her, and she disregards how things like her smoking and her cat, Marmaduke, affect Arthur. Near the end of the book, she’s much more sympathetic in that regard, but she seems very callous about her own contributions to his health issues.

There’s a very slow burn of affection between the two of them. I could see Jane’s attitude toward Arthur changing as the book went on. Their attitude towards each other seems completely unromantic early on. The two are friends and coworkers, even though Jane is Arthur’s boss. By the end of the book, though, after having spent several days living together in Jane’s childhood home, there is something more beginning to spark between them. It has been a bit more companionable for the two, and Jane seems the like Benson quite a bit as well.

Where The Seaside Murders was lacking for me, besides some of Jane’s attitude, was the way the story flowed. Things seemed to happen conveniently rather than feeling like things were spontaneous. When they needed to talk to a certain character, they happened to stumble across her, even though she was virtually imprisoned by her husband. As they are attempting to track the black marketers, rather than investigating it, their first inclination after talking about it a lot seems to be going out in an air raid looking for them. I can understand the reasoning behind what they did, but it seemed like they were investigating the mysterious death as a murder for quite a bit of the book, and then when they turned to the thefts and black marketing, their first inclination was to guess where they would be during an air raid and go there. It works because, of course, it did.

The Seaside Murders has that British cozy mystery feel to it. I had some issues with it, but I’m intrigued enough that I would give the next book in the series a chance. There’s nice character development, even if some of the story was completely predictable. I liked how the affection between Jane and Arthur is growing very slowly. Setting the mystery during World War II also allows the reader to see that, while there were the usual wartime issues overall, life did go on and there were other crimes happening which sometimes slipped by the wayside.