For the duration of my time with The Cloak and Dagger Club, there was one question which I kept asking myself: Why am I still reading this book? It was the same reason I finish every murder-mystery novel I pick up: I need to know who the killer is. Often this is to my detriment. I have dragged my suffering self through many a terrible novel just to know who killed the victim. It’s okay, we’re all allowed our flaws and this one only harms me.

The story takes place in 1930s London. Lucy is a debut mystery author and has been invited to join The Cloak and Dagger Club – a club for published mystery writers. It’s a small, select group, so it’s a privilege to be invited. The problem is that Frank is already a member and has been for a few years. He is Lucy’s former fiance and things ended rather badly between them. Lucy attends precisely one meeting and then, afterwards, the chairperson of the club is killed. The police suspect Frank. Lucy is determined to work with Frank and clear him of suspicion by finding the actual murderer.

In so many ways this story was DESIGNED for me. Set in 1930s London? Yes, please! Mystery-romance? Two genres I enjoy! Perhaps because I was so excited for it, it fell more flat than it would have had I just picked the book up randomly with no expectations or excitement.

So what didn’t work for me? Let me list the sins.

Sin the first: I didn’t get a strong sense of time and place when reading The Cloak and Dagger Club. I missed the historical details which bring colour to the setting. Aside from only WWI having taken place, it could have happened at any time from the invention of the motor car up to the invention of the computer.

Sin the second: The plot was by turns pedestrian and, towards the end, straight-up annoying. The earlier part felt like a dull, paint-by-numbers murder mystery except that the most obvious suspect was COMPLETELY ignored. Frank and Lucy decided that it had to be someone from the club, thereby neglecting the other (admittedly small) group of people the victim interacted with at the hotel where he lived and was killed. Aside from the original starting premise, nothing about this book stood out from the countless other murder-mysteries that I’ve read. In fact, as I edit this review, so much of the plot has already disappeared into the mists of my memory. Almost none of it is memorable.

I struggled to care much about the characters, except for one: Frank has a love interest at the start of the story named Ruth, and the way she was treated annoyed me to no end.

Before Lucy reenters the picture at the start of the story, Frank has a casual situationship with Ruth. When Lucy reenters, Frank still visits Ruth and goes on dates with her. I got quite angry with how Ruth was portrayed: she’s a cheerful, vapid woman. I know we’re supposed to prefer deep-feeling Lucy, but I can’t help but wonder why Ruth was in there at all. Ruth was such a flat character. She liked Frank because he was a famous writer and she wanted to be one, too. She was obliviously optimistic in the face of all of Frank’s insistence on their ‘relationship’ being casual and essentially meaningless. There is a scene where Frank unburdens himself to Ruth, sharing his feelings about the painful end of a friendship with another character. Ruth callously dismisses his feelings and tells him his friend will get over it. She was so patently not meant for him and their relationship did nothing to drive the plot forward. It felt like Frank was being set up to choose between Lucy and Ruth, but there was really no contest between the two. Frank never felt anything deeper for Ruth at all. So why let her character persist so far into the book? Why not focus on the renewed bonds of love and friendship between Lucy and Frank? I know the romance is just a subplot, but I was still a bit annoyed by it all. I felt like the entire Ruth storyline wasted my time by accomplishing little, and it detracted from the story.

Did I like anything about it? Well, yes. I enjoyed the multiple POVs as different members of the Cloak and Dagger Club narrate the story at different intervals, and I enjoyed getting glimpses of the plot from their perspectives.

I would be very curious how a mystery-romance aficionado would find The Cloak and Dagger Club. In fact, I would be very curious how anyone found this book. I’m not sure if I missed the point of the story, or if I was missing something overall. All the ingredients were there, but due to the weak love triangle, the pedestrian nature of the plot, and the absent sense of time or place, the final product was at turns boring, disappointing, and frustrating. I wanted to like this book, but there was just nothing special about the story except for the interesting starting premise.