But Lucy couldn’t bear to cut down her book collection. How could she when there were so many interesting novels to read in this world, and more coming out every year?
page 91, Chapter 9
Table of Contents
Why The Cloak and Dagger Club?
As regular readers of this blog might know I’ve been on a bit of a mystery kick this summer. Mystery has served as a much needed palate cleanser between heavier fiction genres and especially the specific formula of a whodunit mystery is a comfortable one to me and brings back memories of enjoying the Sherlock Holmes stories as a child.
So when I saw a newsletter email from bookshop.org mentioning The Cloak and Dagger Club by Jackie McMahon, I immediately put in library hold for it. In addition to another whodunit mystery inspired by the Agatha Christie stories, it also involved a meta element in the form of the main characters being mystery writers themselves.
I read a hardcover edition of this book published by Berkley in July 2026 (ISBN/UID: 9798217189557). This is my first time reading anything by Jackie McMahon. Author blurbs on this edition are from – Rhys Brown, Liz Lawson, Kemper Donovan, Bryn Donovan, Vanessa Kelly, and Patrice McDonough.
Let’s get into it.
The Book
The Cloak and Dagger Club is a whodunit mystery novel combined with a second chance romance. We need a clever one word name for this genre combination – mystromance? romanmystery? Nope. None of that works. I think we need to abandon that idea.
This book is set in London, UK in 1930. The story is told from the perspective of Lucy Hubbard, a debut mystery novel writer who’s debut novel is doing well and as such she has invited to the exclusive Cloak and Dagger Club, a mystery writer’s club headed up by the king of crime fiction, Horace Hazelmoor (great name by the way).
The second chance romance elements come in the form of one Frank Murray, another mystery writer who happens to be Lucy’s ex-fiance and also a member of the club. Awkward. So after the opening act where all the characters are introduced and the murder victim (Horace) is dead as a doornail, Lucy and Frank reluctantly and awkwardly decide to work together to put their mystery writer skills to solving Horace’s murder and also clearing Frank’s name because he is the prime suspect.
The middle section of the book is the investigation section where Lucy and Frank go through the rest of the club’s membership and try to figure out if any of them did it. Talk to people, look at clues, do research in a library etc. All the while trying not to admit to each other that they are still in love with each other. It is all a little by the numbers here, nothing you haven’t seen before.
The Cloak and Dagger Club is one of those novels where I can tell that this is a debut novel. The prose while quite readable is not doing anything particularly special here. The writing style also felt…well stiff is not quite the right word, it was more like it was telling me things in a matter-of-fact way. It felt less like I was in Lucy’s mind and more like I was reading a constructed fiction.
I also think that the story could have done without the second-chance romance sub-plot. It felt like Jackie McMahon bit off more than she could chew on a debut novel by doing a genre combination like this. I don’t think the romance sub-plot is offensively bad but it isn’t compelling either, I was definitely more motivated to finish this book by the mystery plot rather than the romance.
The last time I read a book with a second-chance romance trope was Seven Days in June by Tia Williams. I had my reservations about that book but I think the trope was done better in that novel because that novel is primarily a romance novel, it is not trying to do a genre combination. I think the second-chance romance trope in this book needed more time to cook and it just didn’t have that because there was a mystery main plot to attend to as well.
As for the mystery itself, I thought it was serviceable and the culprit was one I didn’t predict until the last quarter of the book. The cast of characters was reasonably interesting and there were some smaller sub-plots involving some of the cast that kept me locked in but overall I don’t think there was any particular character I really liked. I felt a mild affection for Lucy since she is a bookish nerd but that’s about it really.
Concluding Thoughts
The Cloak and Dagger Club was an okay time. It delivered a serviceable whodunit mystery with an inoffensive second-chance romance stuffed in there. As far as debut novels are concerned this is not the worst debut I have read this year by a far margin and if you are someone who enjoys mystery and romance together, you should give it a shot, you may enjoy it more than I did.
I am open to reading more from Jackie McMahon especially if she is going to be writing more mystery novels. Preferably without the romance or at least one that is better developed than this one.
That is all from me, see y’all in the next one.
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