Witty Little Knitter

With the recent series of college murders behind him, Cambridge Fellow Jonty Stewart is in desperate need of a break. A holiday on the beautiful Channel Island of Jersey seems ideal, if only he can persuade Orlando Coppersmith to leave the security of the college and come with him. Orlando is a quiet man who prefers academic life to venturing out into the world. Within the confines of their rooms at the university, it's easy to hide the fact that he and Jonty are far more than friends. But the desire to spend more time alone with the man he loves is an impossible lure to resist. When a brutal murder occurs at the hotel where they're staying, the two young men are once more drawn into the investigation. The race to catch the killer gets complicated by the victim's son, Ainslie, a man who seems to find Orlando too attractive to resist. Can Stewart and Coppersmith keep Ainslie at bay, keep their affair clandestine, and solve the crime?

(That blurb is btw so not what happens in the book but whatever)

This was...nice. Not bad but not great either. The mystery was OK, but one throwaway line made it really easy to figure out parts of it. There was still enough to keep me guessing.

I didn't get at all why it was necessary to have parts of the story told from Mathew's point of view. I'm pretty sure that all the other books from the series, I've read so far, were just written from Orlando's and Jonty's POV and I really don't understand why it was changed here. It added nothing and they were honestly done rather sloppily mid-chapter.

There is a rather widespread trope on cozies that is 'the police have somebody as their main suspect and the amateur sleuths just refuse to believe that this person did it' and I honestly don't think it was executed that well here. I can buy this if the suspect is somebody the main characters have known for a long time but here they only just met him but still Jonty never wavers in his conviction that Mathew didn't do it. Even Orland isn't convinced, but Jonty ignores that. 

I also found Jonty's behaviour questionable in regards to their relationship in general. It was like he was willing to accept that Orlando needed time to get over his past traumas, but Jonty would decide how much time that was. He was pressing him to talk about things at several occasions, including one time that felt more like emotional blackmail. That was even worse because the question he asked then was 'Why did your father kill himself' which really is just morbid curiosity on his part. I get why making Orlando talk about his childhood in general would be helpful, but that? Not so much.

(Also: his 'only penetrative sex is real sex'-views? Ugh)