Freya Lockwood and her Aunt Carole are back into his sequel to the popular Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder (which we previously reviewed HERE) When a painting goes missing from a maritime museum and a dead body is found, they’re on the case under the banner of their new business as stolen antiquities hunters. The trail leads them to taking an antiques cruise towards the Red Sea in Jordan, in which they start to spot stolen items on the inventory and find out their nemesis The Collector may be at hand …

CL Miller is the daughter of Judith Miller, a well known Antiques expert and author of the Miller’s Antique price guide, so her knowledge of antiques and the antiques dealership world, is peppered delightfully throughout this series. The first novel in this series was very well received, so this book comes eagerly anticipated by readers. In structure, the book is written in first person for what Freya sees, and third for other characters POV.

In this book, and I get the feeling that there will be more in the series, Freya has started their business as Antiquities Hunters, or investigators who locate and reclaim stolen items from museums etc, and she and her Aunt Carole are hoping to find their first clients. Initially, the book captures some of that anxiety of a small business finding it’s footing and the anxiety and excitement of making it work. I really like these two characters in general. Freya is likable and relatable, vulnerable but strong, though I find it an odd choice to have just her chapters in first person. And Aunt Carole is someone who shines and has a playful, theatricality to her that I enjoy. Some characters from the previous book are here. For me, I found that I’d forgotten them, and I was sometimes a bit lost on which characters we were meant to remember and which were new.

I realised as I was reading the book that it’s sort of hinting at Agatha Christie as a mystery, famously some of her books were set in the world of antiquities and around this part of the world, but really, it’s not a cozy mystery series. It’s more a cozy adventure series. It’s about Freya facing up to the bad guys, but the bad guy is always The Collector. And the Collector is never going to be a huge twist, because we know it’s not Freya or Carole, or out main characters, basically. There’s plenty of Golden Era mystery locations, but there’s no whodunnit, in the sense that we know The Collector ordered the death. We find out why, but we may be more interested in if Phil and Freya will get together or how our heroines will get out of being kidnapped. Also, The Collector is a lot like a comic book character, in that like the Phantom, where they have been around for a very long time, are legendary and secretly pass the mantle of Collector onto a successor. A cozy adventure, then, rather than a mystery.

I liked this book on the whole. It’s a story world I like to spend time in, I like to two leads, and I like all the little titbits about the antiques world. This time the plotting felt a little bit uneven, the middle felt sometimes like nothing was really happening, and then the ending felt a bit sped up. There wasn’t really that mystery to keep the reader interested. The romance was a bit lackluster, not a lot of smolder there. There were some nice things, with references to little clues Arthur, who was the victim in the first novel, had left for them, and a nice side plot with their assistant Sky, who was back on dry land. It felt like the middle novel in a trilogy: good if you liked the first one, and a lot of set up for the next one, but not as satisfying on it’s own. I did like it, and if you liked the first one, you will probably like this one, but it needed a little more plot.

Read It If: you liked the first book and want more. It has more in common with Elizabeth Peters (sort of) than Death On The Nile, and though a little slow, the details are really good.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster Canada for the ARC of this book for review.