Murder in Highbury is a perfectly all right little mystery that’s hampered by its predictability. The romance isn’t its central focus, which also hampered my enjoyment of the proceedings. Yet the language of the book and Emma’s characteristic intensity keep it from being an outright failure.

Emma Knightley has settled happily into married life. Unfortunately, the peace she and George have established is rudely wrecked by Mrs. Elton. But instead of spreading gossip, Mrs. Elton has ruined Emma’s equilibrium by turning up dead in the Highbury church, a large wound on her head and her neck showing strangulation marks.

Emma is not one to simply let things lie, and she well knows that Mrs. Elton had many enemies who would gladly have wished her dead. But who actually did the deed and killed off Highbury’s most annoying gossip? It’s up to Emma, Harriet, George, and the rest of their friends to find out.

There are two major problems with this book – the romance is muted and the mystery is pretty fairly predictable. We get a number of red herrings, but the identity of the culprit seems pretty clear from almost the beginning. That doesn’t lower the stakes – this person has killed with gruesome accuracy and would gladly kill one of our protagonists – but it makes the solution of the mystery feel foregone.

The highlight of the book is Emma being Emma – brave, determined, intelligent, but also highly flawed and headstrong as always. Her romance with George is given a bit of a short shrift – understandable with the chaos surrounding them – but I wanted more of it to leaven the blood and guts. We do get updates about Harriet and Robert and Frank and Jane. Harriet, naturally, is a big part of the book; Jane is more sidelined as she copes with a pregnancy. The setting feels well-researched between the clues.

This book is complicated to rate. It’s a little too bloody to be a cozy mystery, and it’s a little too predictable for those seeking a thrill ride. Murder in Highbury works well enough to make me curious about what will happen in the next Emma Knightley Mystery – but it’s not good enough to earn anything over a middling grade.