Author: Kim Herdman Shapiro
Genre: Mystery
Year Published: 2023
Nerdection Rating:
“Nerdection Worth to read”
The Raven’s Cry By Kim Herdman Shapiro is A New cozy mystery series published on March 14, 2023, set in the small town of Wynter Island.
Spoiler-free Plot
Kate has just moved to Wynter Island, a small town with a dwindling population in British Columbia. She’s a journalist who spent a lot of time with her boyfriend, Daniel, in Kabul, Afghanistan covering the war. After deciding it was best to leave Afghanistan and return home to the east coast of the States she finds out her boyfriend was cheating on her.
With everything going on, it was the perfect time to pack up and leave. She takes a job on Wynter Island to start a television broadcast station. She meets several new friends and starts acclimating to her new life in a new town vastly different from what she was used to.
After attending a community dinner shortly after her arrival, she discovers the body of her ex-boyfriend Daniel floating in the water. Who else would the local police suspect other than the jilted ex-lover? Desperate to prove her own innocence, Kate investigates Daniel’s death on her own and uncovers secrets within the small and seemingly peaceful town.
My Thoughts on The Raven’s Cry:
The Raven’s Cry is a mystery novel and it sticks closely to the classic plot structure of the genre. I always enjoy reading small-town mysteries and this book fits into that category well. The setting of the book, Wynter Island, is charming and easy to escape into. The residents all have their own quirks and personalities which makes it easy to fall in love with some of them and hate others.
Wynter Island is a small town that survives mostly on summer tourist revenue. Gwen, a descendant of the original founder of the island, hires Kate to spearhead the formation of a television network to garner attention for the island. Their goal is to get more residents and visitors on the island for more revenue to help rejuvenate it.
I enjoyed the scenes in the book where Kate was working with some of the station’s volunteers to come up with program ideas and host broadcasts. The inaugural show is a weekly broadcast of “Fish BINGO” where the viewers in the town could play along and win freshly caught wild salmon or various other prizes. These scenes really highlighted the small-town community setting for me and I thought it added an extra level of charm to it.
Daniel’s death happened early on in the book and the more you read the more the mystery unravels. Almost everyone in this book is a suspect and Kate treats them as such a lot of the time. Raven’s Cry is the first book of a new series, so I am eager to see how the relationships change in the future after some of the encounters Kate had with the residents.
But one of the most endearing encounters was with the scraggly silver-haired stray dog, Jupiter. Shea. the town’s resident animal rescuer, took him in a year before Kate arrived. He has always been aloof and standoffish toward everyone. That is until Kate arrived. She even described their bond as “supernatural” in the book. She adopted the dog and the two were virtually inseparable.
The only issue I had with the book was at times I found it a bit repetitive. For example, in the end, after the case was solved there were two back-to-back scenes explaining what happened. And from time to time it felt like Kate was having more or less the same conversation with different people.
Overall, The Raven’s Cry was a quick, cozy small-town mystery with a diverse cast of characters and an intriguing murder case. It’s a great read for any fans of the genre! I would give this book 4/5 stars!
Content Warnings and Rating
The audience for this book would be 17+ due to some of the content and swearing
Murder, drug trafficking, kidnapping, torture, guns
About The Author Of The Raven’s Cry
Kim Herdman Shapiro worked as a journalist in Canada for many years, with experience in both print and broadcast journalism. Her book, Gelato with the Pope, highlights her time as a syndicated travel columnist in the Nineties.
In addition to her syndicated travel column, she has written feature articles for various publications, edited a monthly children’s publication in British Columbia, and had her poetry published in Do Whales Jump at Night? A Canadian Anthology of Children’s Poetry. She won a Microsoft web design award for Footloose, one of the first digital e-zines on the internet.
For the past eight years she has been working on her video project, What the hell is a Toque? This chronicles her travels with her sons from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island and up to the Canadian Arctic.
Kim is also a board member of Sisters in Crime New England.
She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, two sons, and three dogs.
