Book Review: The Expectant Detectives by Kat Ailes
By Janet Webb
January 26, 2024
Readers will be hard-pressed to find a more original and laugh-out-loud debut mystery than The Expectant Detectives. The detectives are “a group of soon-to-be moms” who meet at a prenatal class.
Alice and her partner Joe pick up sticks and move from London to Penton, a bucolic (and fictional) Cotswold “market town.” There’s some urgency—Alice is in her third trimester, and they want to rent a place with room for a baby and Helen, their unruly, gorgeous dog. Alice muses, with “neither of us earning a six-figure salary, if we stayed in London we’d be living in a (barely) converted garage and our baby would be sleeping in a drawer.” Alice tries to embrace their new milieu.
As far as it’s possible to tell via Google, Penton gave off a certain vibe that I would vaguely describe as “posh hippy”. When picking our future home, this was something I felt I could get onboard with, as despite being neither posh nor hippy I have, more or less successfully, masqueraded as both at various points in my life.
Alice is feeling pretty good as she and Joe roll down the highway, although Joe’s “a tad stressed.” Understandably since he’s driving and did most of the packing. Them’s the breaks: “being heavily pregnant gives you a get-out-of-jail-free card for lifting anything heavier than a sausage roll.” Kat Ailes is not shy about describing pregnancy in minute detail. Not only does Alice “need to pee every five minutes,” she’s “chronically uncomfortable” and “radioactively overheated.” Only five weeks to go. Joe is a freelance graphic designer and Alice is a copywriter at an advertising agency—her job is “mediocre, but at least reliable.” For now, though, she’s on mat leave.
The first challenge in our new life threatened to derail me at the outset: making new friends as a grown-up. Is there anything more painful, more fraught with pitfalls, more ridden with such potential for deep humiliation? The last time I made friends—nearly a decade ago—I worked in an office crammed with people who shared my interest in HBO box sets, semi-educational podcasts and the kind of wine that comes in the “3 for £10” deals at the petrol station.
The Expectant Detectives is told in Alice’s self-deprecating, unfailingly honest, and very Bridget Jones voice, i.e., “I’m thirty-one, heavily pregnant, and largely running on an unstable cocktail of hormones and icing from a can.” She’s hopeful they’ll make friends at “an alarmingly named prenatal “crash course.”” They arrive late at the Nature’s Way shop where the course is being held above-stairs. Joe is uncomfortable with the “weird hippy shit” vibe of the store. The proprietor, Mr. Oliver, engages them in conversation—suggesting herbal pregnancy concoctions. Joe’s ready to split but Alice isn’t about to forego a “hundred quid”: “Let’s go and make some expensive friends.” They aren’t thrilled with the instructor.
“Hi, mums and dads,” she began. I hated her already. “I’m Dot!” She looked like such a Dot. She beamed. Constantly. “Well, isn’t this exciting!”
We all stared at her in stony silence.
“I thought we’d start by sharing what we’re most excited about for the birth!”
It’s grueling and uncomfortable.
The second session begins with a bang: ““I’m in latent labor,” announces Hen at the start of that evening’s meeting.”” It’s all hands-on deck after her water breaks. Dot punctuates Hen’s labor by feeding Antoni, Hen’s partner, inane slogans.
“My partner and I are the world’s best team.”
Hen gave him a look that promised to strangle him with the umbilical cord.
“I am overflowing with oxytocin?”
At this point Hen projectile vomited all over Antoni. Then she yelled some more. And then—she had a baby.
At long last, an ambulance shows up. The paramedics are in the shop. Alice shouts down.
“We’re upstairs. She’s already had the baby!”
There was a pregnant (ha) pause.
“Oh . . . we’re not here for the chap down here, then? ’Cause I’m pretty sure he’s dead and there’s not a lot we can do about that.”
Poor Mr. Oliver. What could have happened to him? Alice, Ailsa, and Poppy, the two other expectant mums, think to themselves, they’ve got a bit of time on their hands before their babies arrive—why not investigate? Perhaps Hen could join in. Alice texts the details to her best friend Maya (a Londoner who is also her backup birth partner): “Maybe I’ll investigate and find out! Like a youthful, pregnant Miss Marple in tie-dye leggings.”
Mr. Oliver’s murder is the first of many local mysteries: “Between the discovery of a shady commune up in the woods, the unearthing of a mysterious death years earlier, and the near-tragic poisoning of Helen, Alice is soon in way over her head.” There’s more. Might some of the “expectant detectives” partners be up to no good? Folks seem reluctant to let the amateur detectives on to the commune’s property. Why? Who was the girl who joined the commune and died mysteriously then years ago? What’s up with a siren by the name of Flora—decades earlier, everyone in the commune seemed to have a crush on her. Rumor has it that Flora left the commune when she was in the family way and like the movie Mamma Mia, three men might have fathered her child, including the late Mr. Oliver.
The Expectant Detectives sends up too-gorgeous-to-be-true Cotswolds Instagram accounts, replacing fantasy with mothers-to-be finding friendship, and solving tricky mysteries, all whilst living in a glorious spot. Poppy’s partner Lin rhapsodizes about Penton to Alice: “You don’t get proper seasons in London, not like in the countryside. Out here, it’s a whole new world with each passing month.”
The Expectant Detectives was such an enjoyable debut mystery. I’m looking forward to Dead Tired: A Mystery—what’s next for Alice and the merry mothers/detectives?