When I’ve got the January blues, I find myself longing for sunshine and warm beaches. So when I came across Death Comes to the Costa del Sol by M. H. Eccleston, I was excited to escape endless rain to the seaside resort of Estipona. (Thanks to NetGalley and Aria & Aries for the digital review copy!)

Death Comes to the Costa del Sol follows art conservator Astrid as she docks her boat in Estipona to reunite with her ex-pat father. The story follows a major mystery involving Internet blackmail and a subplot involving Astrid’s father himself. This premise – seaside town, art conservator protagonist – felt like a bright antidote to dreary weather. And after reading, I found a lot to love in this cozy resort mystery.

A resort town riddle

Death Comes to the Costa del Sol takes place in Estipona, a Spanish resort town off the Mediterranean Sea. The protagonist, Astrid, sails in after a harrowing adventure in the Isle of Wight. She’s hoping to spend some time with her estranged father whole unwinding a bit. She quickly learns that the town’s ex-pats have been targeted by a Twitter troll, and her father asks her to investigate.

This requires Astrid to meet each ex-pat and explore Estipona as she does so. As she travels between ex-pat’s homes, trying to find a common thread between the targets, we’re treated to a lovely description of the setting. Eccleston brings the small town to life, both the idyllic sun-drenched resort and the less-glamorous reality of ex-pat life. We get to see a British import store, a golf course, and a British pub in Estipona. It’s the classic case of escaping elsewhere only to recreate your home.

As someone who grew up in beach towns, this is extremely familiar territory. It serves the same niche in my brain as American Chinese food – not the authentic experience. but there’s a particular nostalgia there. Read this as a resort town novel, not a holiday novel – this is about slightly sunnier home comforts. (An apt setting for a cozy mystery!)

Another way to balance cozy and mystery

Quite often, cozy mystery authors create a cozy atmosphere around a murder. So you’ll have an ice cream store owner, thinking cozy thoughts about ice cream and family members, as they solve a gory crime. “Cozy” and “mystery” describe parallel tracks in the novel.

Eccleston takes a different approach, downgrading the crime while maintaining all the social intrigue. Like other authors who take this route, Eccleston instead focuses on a community insider revealing dark secrets. In earlier years, these were poison pen letters; today, it’s a Twitter troll. There’s some coziness inherent in the cute resort town setting, but the mystery stays cozy with this lower-stakes crime.

That’s not to say it doesn’t work – lower-stakes doesn’t mean bad. If social intrigue and community are the core of the cozy mystery genre, a mysterious Twitter account revealing dark secrets works pretty well to generate tension. The secrets (and their holders) are a nice balance of interesting and familiar: I found myself thinking about local counterparts and engaging more to guess each secret.

Technical difficulties

Perhaps I have too high a bar for technical accuracy in stories, but I found the technical elements in Death Comes to the Costa del Sol a bit lackluster. For a book that centers on a Twitter troll, it contains remarkably little Twitter investigation.

Astrid, the protagonist, knows very little about Twitter, so she quickly stops trying to investigate online. Instead, she chooses to investigate the secrets of the twin, deeming it more expedient than trying to learn a new technology. Which is fair, but then why have a Twitter troll in the first place? Blogs or anonymous emails or letter or public posters would work just as well. (Also, Twitter’s not too different from any other social network – and they’re all designed to be very easy to adopt. For a thirty-something to be unaware of the idea of “following” someone online strains credulity.)

It’s not that I need some massive hacking subplot – solving this mystery via technical methods would make a pretty boring story. But the constant references to Twitter kept breaking the otherwise cozy atmosphere of book. I would have been perfectly happy with either more or less Twitter – but this amount did not do it for me.

Reader’s notes & rating (⭐⭐⭐✨)

This was a lovely little read and I’ve actually gone ahead and bought the first two books in the series. Astrid was a fun protagonist and I’m curious to see if her background as an art conservator comes up more in the other books. The book put me in mind of a warm summer day and would be an excellent beach read in warmer months. (Or as an antidote to atmospheric rivers…) 3.5 stars. If you enjoy beachy cozies, I’d give this a try!

Death Comes to the Costa del Sol will be published on March 2, 2023!