The Murder After The Night Before by Katy Brent - Review

I read How To Kill Men and Get Away With It last summer and liked it, so when I saw that Katy Brent had a new book out I was intrigued to read it. I bought this on Kindle for a couple of quid and picked it up in the middle of July. I had a quiet weekend with a lot of reading and made my way through this book. I found it compulsive reading, but... I think it's like a jam doughnut - it tastes really good at the time but it's not that good for you and you shouldn't eat nothing but jam doughnuts. I found it compelling but for odd reasons, I think. 

So, Molly Monroe is a journalist on a magazine called Girl Chat where she basically writes fluff pieces for pre teens about unicorns and stuff. She lives with her best friend, Posey Porter, (ridiculous names) in London. Posey is a serious journalist, working for The Post. Molly wakes up one morning, the day after her work Christmas party, and finds a strange man in her bed. He introduces himself as Jack. He says they didn't have sex but she has no recollection of what happened the night before or how she met him. She heads off to work. She's late and she's only there like twenty minutes when she realises that she has gone viral on social media. She was filmed the night before giving a blow job to a random man on a street and now everyone is slut shaming her and so on. Her boss isn't impressed and sends her home. Ordinarily she would talk to Posey, but Posey isn't home. She did email Molly the night before detailing that they had rowed and that they needed to talk it over, but Molly doesn't remember what the row was about. 

And then Molly finds Posey's body in the bath of her en suite. The police quickly shrug off the death as accidental - despite bruises on Posey's body, which is one of the plot holes that really bothered me - but Molly starts to dig around. It turns out that Posey was working on a story about the disappearance of a teenager called Lulu Lawrence (another ridiculous name). She was sixteen and reported missing a year before, but then her parents said she had gone to stay with a relative and the story died down. Posey was certain that there was more to it, and she has left a trail of breadcrumbs for Molly to follow to uncover the truth. 

I did find the mystery compelling, but I thought some of the reasons Molly had for either doing something or not doing something were stupid at times and just for plot reasons. I thought things worked out maybe a bit too pat at times, some things were just a little bit convenient for me. I am also not really sure how Posey and Molly were affording to live in this part of London, but there we are. Molly is mostly likeable but a bit insufferable at times. I also found her ability to remember things she had had conversations about months ago really annoying and unrealistic. 

There are some plot holes which I did find annoying. And there's a couple of glaring mistakes - for instance once around the timing of Lulu's disappearance, which I really felt someone should have picked up on - which frustrated me. For that reason I'm having to rate this lower than Katy's previous book. So it's a three out of five from me. I will probably read her next book too, though... everyone likes jam doughnuts once in a while!