After the shenanigans of The Three Dahlias, the new Dahlia Lively film starring Posy Starling is filming in a Welsh stately home, with the iconic film Dahlia actress, Rosalind King, playing one of the suspects/potential victims as a nod to the past. Caro Hooper, the television Dahlia, hasn’t got a part in the film, but it’s not long before she’s summoned by Posy and Rosalind due to the dark undercurrents on set.

Someone is threatening Rosalind’s life, and she nearly suffers a fatal accident when someone switches a prop knife for a real one. But when one of the crew disappears and another is killed in an apparent car accident, it seems that there might well be a murderer in the cast. And when (finally) someone finds themselves on the wrong end of a knife, it falls to the three Dahlias to channel the great detective once again…

“Dame Agatha would have loved this” says the Daily Mail on the cover. Well, yes, but only in the sense that if she’d read it, she’d have thought “Yup, I’m still the Queen of Crime…”

Perhaps that’s a little unfair, but to be clear, I really enjoyed The Three Dahlias and was looking forward to this one immensely. But it suffers from second book syndrome in a number of ways.

First of all – and I may be wrong about this – but it felt like a very long book. 360 pages but with pretty small print, this felt like a much longer book than the first. And it takes a while for things to really kick off as well, so the first part did feel quite slow.

The next problem I had was the focus on Posy, Caro and Rosalind to the exclusion of spending enough time developing the suspects. I found myself going back and checking who was who on a few occasions, but with a couple of exceptions, I never managed to draw much of a picture of them and if I did, I’m pretty sure I’d have forgotten to include a some of them.

On the other hand, I do like the three lead characters. It’s a little odd that after the previous book, they now seem to be the bestest of friends in the whole wide world, but I guess the trauma of that one might have bonded them so closely. But I did like their stories here, especiallty Posy’s, and that helped keep my attention.

The overall plot is quite clever too, and there are definitely clues to it. They are, admittedly, buried in the page count, but they are there.

All in all, I was a bit disappointed in this one, but I’ll still try the next one in the series. AS I said, the lead characters are strong and there is some clever central plotting. Hopefully the next one will return to the strengths of the debut.