When Beth March is found dead in the woods on New Year’s Day, her sisters vow to uncover her murderer.

Suspects abound. There’s the neighbor who has feelings for not one but two of the girls. Meg’s manipulative best friend. Amy’s flirtatious mentor. And Beth’s lionhearted first love. But it doesn’t take the surviving sisters much digging to uncover motives each one of the March girls had for doing the unthinkable.

Jo, an aspiring author with a huge following on social media, would do anything to hook readers. Would she kill her sister for the story? Amy dreams of studying art in Europe, but she’ll need money from her aunt—money that’s always been earmarked for Beth. And Meg wouldn’t dream of hurting her sister…but her boyfriend might have, and she’ll protect him at all costs.

Despite the growing suspicion within the family, it’s hard to know for sure if the crime was committed by someone close to home. After all, the March sisters were dragged into the spotlight months ago when their father published a controversial bestseller about his own daughters. Beth could have been killed by anyone.

Beth’s perspective told in flashback unfolds next to Meg, Jo, and Amy’s increasingly fraught investigation as the tragedy threatens to rip the Marches apart.

For fans of Little Women who want a little more murder this is the book for you. The twists are well-done with some plausible red herrings for the March sisters to investigate before finding the real killer. I saw some reviews that were disappointed by the dead ends and mistakes the Marches made, but they aren’t professional detectives, so I didn’t mind. Besides, Bernet relied on a quick pace between the Now and Then chapters that kept the story engaging.

The flashbacks allowed for readers to slowly piece together the Marches secrets that affect the present day mystery as well as allowing Beth to have a voice outside of her murder and her family.

As for the killer, it feels so obvious now that I read through it, but Bernet hid the trope well with the killer’s naturally sweet and charming personality. Or perhaps I’m not the greatest at picking up murder tropes.

I do enjoy looking at characters so let’s look at the March sisters from oldest to youngest. Meg did not deviate much from her original personality. Sensible, smart, and still trying to keep up with her rich friends. Only willing to go much farther. It makes for a realistic flaw and I could understand her sisters’ frustration that she’s smart, and talented, why does she need designer brands to be happy? Just get new friends.

However, her reticence in letting go of her vanity caused a lot of trouble for her boyfriend, John Brooks, that it made her unsympathetic. I, for one, would have encouraged John to find another. Nor did I feel she really learned to get over that flaw. In the epilogue, she states Beth’s death made her realize that there are more important things but readers never get to see this slow realization or epiphany in the text itself. Sadly compared to Jo, Amy and Beth’s POVs, hers was the least interesting.

Jo is a semi-influencer due to her father’s success. Not the route I would have gone for, but it makes sense in this contemporary setting. She still is her father’s girl, and her rashness means she wants to defend him and his story any way she can. The fact that she can network for her own writing helps. While readers primarily remember Jo as a writer, she’s a writer of “blood and thunder” tales, same as Louisa May Alcott. Not so much the lighter, family fare we know her for. She wants attention, excitement and drama, so this all fits in with her character I think.

It also distracts from her own work as the editor wants her to react to her father’s novel, readers want her to be “not like other girls” as well as her internal critic all have a say in her writing. The mystery is another distraction, but it also inspires her to think critically about her father’s novel. How it portrays each of them, how fans have labeled them to their most basic trait, and how she wants to build more nuanced characters.

She wants to reclaim their story as well as Beth’s. But would that be as exploitative as people claim her father’s novel is? The murder forces her to confront this as well as how she doesn’t know any of her family as well as she thought and that she can learn to love the bad, and the good in them. This is especially true to the hero worship of her father.

Beth is the most misunderstood of the March sisters after the book comes out. Flat, saintly, perfect, timid, and she hates that she’s the one who dies at the end as if she is easy to kill off. Worse, that there’s no future for her. So she strives to be bolder, to be selfish, to want things. Which makes her death even more tragic.

Through the Then chapters, readers get to see the complicated girl striving to form her own identity, and boundaries and coming to understand that some of the traits she hates like her cautiousness and lack of ambition aren’t terrible. She doesn’t have to be overly successful or talented to be worthy of being noticed. She gets infamy in her literary and real deaths, but she deserved to be noticed before then for the complicated, unperfect girl she was when she was alive.

Finally, Amy is characterized as the selfish, flighty party girl with a talent for art and whining. In her dad’s novel and within her family which she hates, but admittedly she doesn’t do much to correct that perception. Until the murder gives her a chance to flex her detective skills. Guilt is playing a big part in it too as she fought with Beth before her death and is fooling around with Laurie behind everyone’s backs.

Before I go on, Laurie’s in this, but he is no where near as charismatic or engaging as he is in the OG Little Women or the movies. He’s just there which makes the love triangle sting less because his dynamic with Jo isn’t sizzling with tension either. Not even in the Then chapters.

Amy’s arc is fully realized as the mystery brings out her biggest flaws- jealousy and pride and forces her into big mistakes that make her realize how much she has to grow. She actively works on it and it’s gratifying to see.

Mr. March is a shadow on the book, his novel providing the point of controversy and the girls’ drastically different reactions to his appropriation of their lives allow us to see a very conflicted man. He’s run off into the wilderness like Thoreau, but his actions affect the girls throughout the book. Marmee is a stable rod in the midst of this, grappling with her own anger at her husband, her grief and trying to keep the girls grounded during their fame. She’s the underrated star of the book.

Bernet does a wonderful job taking small and supporting characters from the original novel and bringing them to their logical next step, building on their personalities and actions into a contemporary setting. Moreover, I appreciated her meta commentary on Little Women in pop culture. We understand Mr. March’s novel is basically the Little Women we know, and she comments on how fandom has a tendency to flatten and flanderize the women to basic traits. They miss the nuance of the girl’s growth within the novel or misread it entirely, projecting their own experiences on the girls. It’s fascinating and made me deeply think about how we change the message of Little Women and what each girl represents to fit with the times.

It even ties into today’s celebrity culture where fans develop parasocial relationships, and the celebrities themselves are unable to control the perception of themselves from the wider narrative.

A stellar mystery wrapped in homage and commentary to a beloved classic.

4 stars