Review: Speak for the Dead

Amy Tector’s The Honeybee Emeralds was one of my favourite books of 2022 (review here). I was thrilled to start her new mystery series, The Dominion Archives, later in the year with The Foulest Things (review here) but it left me feeling…unsatisfied. Speak for the Dead is the next book in the mystery series and it jumps ahead in time to present day but…it still didn’t thrill me - which is such a disappointment.

Here’s the book’s description:

It's a steamy summer Ottawa day when Dr Cate Spencer is called out to the nitrate facility to investigate an apparent suicide. The eerie building is filled with deteriorating nitrate film that could literally spontaneously combust. When Cate's life is threatened by a stray spark, she suspects the suicide might be murder. Despite pressure from the police to pronounce a cause quickly, Cate is bloody-minded enough to keep investigating. Whether she's looking for answers because of her dedication to justice, or as a distraction from the grief she feels over her brother's recent death, her inquiries plunge her into a world of military secrets, contentious Indigenous protests and a seventy-year-old mystery with deadly implications.

Now, I’ll be honest, I read this book months ago (it was published in March and I read it right around pub day) but I’ve put off writing the review. I wanted to love the book, probably more than I want to love most, because I knew it had a lot of heavy lifting to do if it wanted to make me love the series. It had promise, you see, but ultimately, I couldn’t get into the story.

Part of the reason I wasn’t really invested was because I didn’t like the main character. I KNOW that I don’t have to like them. Trust me. But if I don’t like them, I need to at least be intrigued by them and with Cate? I didn’t care. I think I was mad at her for her drinking - which absolutely was not fair of me. Addictions can’t be helped and she wasn’t getting the medical help she needed. I was sad for her too. Her grief was so palpable, and hadn't been dealt with appropriately, and I desperately wanted her to be OK.

I was also initially thrown by the fact that this book took place so long after the first in the series and didn’t feature a museum worker but instead a coroner. I don’t know why that stuck out for me so much but here we are. I liked that Cate was a coroner (why, yes, I did  watch CSI back in the day) as it provided a different look at the mystery. But I think I missed the museum connection just a little bit.

Speak for the Dead should have been a book I liked. I know Amy Tector has talent but something about these mysteries that are a part of her Dominion Archives series has been leaving me feeling flat. I’m still hopeful her next book will wow me because I know she can and the idea behind this series does intrigue me.

*An ARC of this novel was provided by the author in exchange for review consideration. All opinions are honest and my own.*