My thanks to HarperCollins U.K. One More Chapter for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘Red House’ by Joss Stirling in exchange for an honest review. It was published in November 2020 and my apologies for the late feedback.

This is the third in Joss Stirling’s series of mysteries featuring private investigator, Jess Bridges, and DI Leo George of the Oxford police. I have now read all of the previous books, though Stirling does provide enough background for readers new to the series.

A body is discovered buried in the garden of a large house in central Oxford owned by a Russian oligarch and DI Leo George is on the scene. The gardener who discovered the body tells him about the sweet girl who has just taken over house-sitting of the neighbouring huge mansion, known as the Red House. It turns out to be Jess! The Red House is owned by another billionaire, this one from Uzbekistan. There’s a complex history between the two men and their families. Naturally Jess gets involved in the investigation.

This was again a delightful whodunnit, not quite a cosy though it has enough comedic touches to lighten its darker elements. It is set at Christmas and one subplot has Jess in a temporary job at one of the colleges, where she is assigned the task by her unreasonable boss to decorate its Tudor chapel for a BBC documentary on a minimal budget.

I also appreciated that an earlier owner of the Red House loved Alice in Wonderland and had decorated the garden with statues of its various characters.

Certainly a book and series that I enjoy very much.

I very much enjoyed this book. It has a good story and excellent main characters. I would definately recommend this book.

Red House is the third book in the Jess Bridge's series. After reading the previous instalments in this series I was rather excited to dive back in to this story.
I really enjoyed catching up with characters that we have come to know, and I was rather intrigued to see how Jess and Leo's path's would cross once again.

I thought this book was brilliantly written from beginning to end. The author has a wonderful writing style that really pulls you in and keeps you fully immersed in the story as it progresses.
The characters are well developed and I find that every time we come back to this series we get to know these characters on a deeper level.

A brilliant, gripping read! I am looking forward to book 4!

Compelling!! Red House is an excellent read. Red House by Joss Stirling is an engrossing novel with characters that capitulate you.

This story is about Jess as a private investigator and Leo as a detective who together investigate mysteries. The characters are well done and believable. Overall, the story is fascinating and I highly recommend.

Excellent!! I sat down to just read a few chapters. The next time I looked up was the end of the book at 2AM. I thought Jess was neurotic, nosy and just plain interesting. Her relationship with Leo is adorable. The story was good too. The first guilty party was pretty easy to figure out. It was rather broadly hinted along the way. The end was a good twist. Did we like the rich house owners? No we did not! I enjoyed this book.

This is the third book in this ongoing series and it’s fitting like a good shoe. Jess is a private investigator who has extra jobs on the side and Leo is the detective who investigates the bad stuff in picturesque Oxford, and while their interactions are always professional the earlier books hint at flirting so this time round, we have a mystery with a generous helping of romance which was fun to read.

Murder mystery,third in this series featuring Jess and Leo. Lots of diverse characters,some familiar,some new and a good storyline.

Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins UK, One More Chapter for this free copy of the book in return for an honest review.

This is book 3 in the Jess Bridges Mysteries, and here it is Christmas time in Jolly Old England. Set in Oxford, Jess is a temp worker who is right smack in the middle of the BBC Christmas TV special and, despite the “drama” involved with this production, it is quickly overshadowed by the fact that a body has been discovered in a wealthy neighborhood garden. This brings DI Leo George into the scene as he is in charge of the investigation and quickly discovers that the body appears to have been buried for at least 13 months or longer.

Living in the neighborhood is Jess Bridges, who in addition to holding down the temp job at Oxford, also is a missing persons investigator, and in addition to house sitting at what is referred to as the “Red House” due to the brick color. Jess and Leo apparently almost had a date in a prior book but romance never materialized, but in this book that is about to change.

The body was found at the house owned by Russian Oligarch, Anatoly Chernov, and Jess is house sitting in an even larger house owned by a Uzbek diamond Oligarch who she has not heard from for months.

Neither oligarch has lived in their respective houses for months, nor has any of their extended families and so Jess and Leo team up to try and figure out who is in the garden, and solve the crime. Along the way we are introduced to the nosey and combative neighborhood association who are trying to keep the Oxford area from degenerating into rather non-traditional uses – someone wanted to install a pool, another wanted to turn the mansion into student housing units. While it sounds a bit confusing, it goes to show how protective so many people are of their neighborhoods and what lengths people will go to protect them.

While this is a Jess Bridges mystery, she really does not have a lot to do with solving this crime. The plot is good, the characters are interesting, but I was able to easily figure out the murderer as one by one every possible suspect just did not fit for the murder. I have not read the first two books, but there is enough here for me to want to give Book 4 a chance. The author seems to have graduated from the Young Adult/Fantasy genre, and there really is a lot to like in these Jess Bridges Mysteries.

I finally caught up with the first two in the series so that I could read this bad boy.
It did not disappoint. FINALLY, there is something going on with Jess and Leo. I thought this would never come!
I love how each mystery in this series is so different. This one had ties to influential Russian and Uzbek business families.
As usual, this author wrote this book very well and thought of every detail. I must say, though this book wasn’t predictable. I smashed the mystery before Jess and Leo did.

Review featured at www.books-n-kisses.com

Ok so I am thinking I didn’t enjoy this book so much because it is the third in the series and I had not read the other ones. I think I was missing something by coming in late but was still able to figure it out.

The story was nothing new. Very typical of the genre. Man is killed and then another man is killed next door. And while Jess is not a cop she is the only one who figures it out. I get tired of stories that make the cops seem stupid and some investigator can come in and figure it out.

That being said the story had a lot of potential and I may have enjoyed it more if I had read the first two in the series.

Disclaimer:
I received a complimentary copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Red House is the third instalment in Joss Stirling's series set in Oxford featuring thirty-odd-year-old PI Jess Bridges and this novel definitely starts with a bang.

Gardener Marigold Green gets more than she bargained for when she unearths a corpse whilst mulching a holly tree. Detective Inspector Leo George is on the case and crosses paths again with Jess who's house-sitting for the deceased's neighbour next door. It soon becomes apparent that the victim - a Russian millionaire - and Jess' client, Akmal Gulom - a billionaire and diamond trader - were feuding...

This was an absorbing, witty and riveting read with a plot that gripped me. The pacing was swift and I was racing along to find out what would be occurring next. Joss Stirling has again rewarded me with her chaotic, fun and reckless main character and I was rooting for Jess all the way. An action-packed, rousing and expertly plotted story with a surprising ending, I can't wait to see what treats will be in store when book four, Grey Stones is released. Very highly recommended.

Thanks to NetGalley, One More Chapter and the author, Joss Stirling for the complimentary advanced copy. This is my honest and totally voluntary review.

First of all, I want to say thank you to Netgalley for gifting me this book in return for an honest review. That being said, I accidentally started in the middle of the series! Red House is the third installment in Joss Stirling's Jess Bridges Mystery series. Even though I started in the middle I never felt lost while reading the story. They thoroughly and briefly went through the history and back story. I thoroughly enjoyed the story line and drama in this book! This book makes you question if you ever truly know who your neighbors are. In this culture Oxford suburb, one might think they do. But they would be terribly wrong. This gripping, fast paced murder mystery dives deep into the world of the elite who live in there and send there children to their high end schools. When the body of a Russian oligarch is found buried in his own garden people start to talk. Detective Inspector Leo George suspects he upset someone in high places. But could it be as simple as a long held grudge. Jess Bridges, the heroine who is house sitting the lot next door, and DI Leo team up to get to the bottom of the mystery and enjoy the company of each other in the meantime. His superior detective skills and Bridges uncanny ability to always be caught in the middle of things made for a entertaining pair! I undeniably enjoyed the romance and tension between the two and can't wait to see where they end up in the books to come! Red House is a thrilling read that kept my attention throughout and had me on the edge of my seat! The unpredictable twists and turns kept me intrigued and questioning what I would do in that situation. I give Red House a 5 out of 5 stars! I definitely recommend it to all mystery/ romance lovers!

My third in the Jess Bridges series and I’m really feeling at home now. It’s definitely my go-to series this year. As with those well- loved tv detective series like Morse/Midsummer Murders etc. there are some definite patterns. A body at the start, Jess entertaining us with her lack of boundaries, inventiveness, unique sense of humour and capacity for scrapes. Added to this the delicious evolving romance with Detective Leo and the beautiful Oxford setting. This time there’s a cold case (or cold body as it’s been in the ground at least a year!) Nearby Jess is housesitting and discovers a further body. This is a really entertaining read, hugely enjoyable and if you like the Jess Bridges formula you will love it. The first in the series chilled me more than the second and third which definitely have a ‘cosier’ feel. With thanks to Netgalley and One More Chapter for a digital copy of this great read.

Red House is the third book in the Jess Bridges series. Now, the blurb for this one doesn’t give much away, so I went into it knowing that I loved the character, but without much clue as to what they were getting themselves into this time. I was particularly interested to see how Jess and Leo’s paths would cross, and luckily I didn’t have to wait to find out.

Red House finds Jess house-sitting in, you’ve guessed it, a mysterious red house. I must confess that Joss Stirling’s descriptions of this house made it sound far too creepy to be somewhere that I would willingly stay, but I am a huge Alice in Wonderland fan, so I would love to explore the garden attached to the house.

I think of the three Jess Bridges mysteries so far, Red House is my favourite, partly because of the completely baffling crimes that are uncovered, but mainly because this time around we find out more about the backgrounds of Jess, Michael and Leo, discovering more about each of their pasts. It felt like we were getting to them all more personally now that the previous books and thoroughly introduced them on a professional level, and I loved this.

I am so in love with this series, and I really hope we won’t have to wait too long for book four!

The series is set in Oxford. It's the third book about DI Leo George and Jess Bridges. It's funny how some of the press releases and blurbs say the series is about DI George but the series is called Jess Bridges. Really Jess is the center. DI George hardly comes through as personality. This book isn't as much fun as the first. For some reason that happened in book 2 (I missed that one) Jess and a newly acquired dog are house-sitting in a fancy mansion with a basement pool. A body is found and then another and Jess figures them out, with DI George taking care of the official stuff. As usual I despise the multiple POV style, here alternating between him and her.

The third in the series featuring DI Leo George and Jess Bridges. Jess is still in Oxford and is house sitting when a body is found in the garden of the house adjacent. The two are thrown together again and investigate the crime. A lovely cozy mystery with it's twists and turns and of course plenty of romance. I love the series and love the antics of Leo and Jess. Although this is the third in series, a good stand alone novel. Recommended.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and author for this ARC.

This is the second book I’ve read by this author and I found it at times quite a hard going read. I did like the authors writing style, and that the story is told through different characters. The problem I had was that the story didn’t really fully engage me and I frequently found myself losing interest and skimming pages. It was a book that was very average read for me, I would have liked it to interest me, thrill me and be much more of a page turner. At times I found the characters to be very irritating and felt the book was a bit too long to keep me fully invested in the story. I’ve not read the second book in this series, and don’t know if reading that would have made this one a better read for me.

A interesting crime story set in Oxford. This involves some involvement with Oxford university, but not too much. This is part of a series about the detective Leo. I have not read any of the others, but this book was fine as a stand alone and any previous contact between the characters was explained in a natural way which did not feel at all overdone.
Jess and Leo's paths cross this time as she is house sitting in an expensive area of Oxford. Both the house where she is staying and the neighbours house belong to Russian business families who have business ventures and properties throughout the world. Leo is called to one of the houses when the gardener unearths a shoe,still attached to the owners foot, buried in the garden. The book follows the investigation, being sometimes held back by both the attitudes of the old school residents of the area and the Russian ways of doing business .
Jess and Leo are attracted to each other, but this has the twin complications of Leo's mother and problems in both of their younger days which could be barriers to a relationship.
I liked the realism in this book and the twists and turns in the plot as the book progressed . Both make for an interesting and believable read , Mostly good and likeable characterisations and descriptions
Thank you to net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review

Red House is a must-read this holiday season. Fall down the rabbit hole with Jess Bridges and experience a crime-filled Christmas at Oxford.

This can be read as a stand-alone but it is best enjoyed in sequence, simply because the characters have grown in leaps and bounds! Jess’ entanglement in yet another police investigation is full of fresh surprises (and the now not so inscrutable DI George).

A book that defies expectations and reveals intricate mysteries within mysteries. Highly recommended!

This book was a happy accident for me as I stumbled onto a book that is 3rd in a series about private investigator Jess Bridges. She specializes in finding missing people and it just so happens that on the property next door, to her house sitting job, a body is uncovered in the garden. Thus begins her newest adventure with Detective Inspector Leo George, with whom she’d like to have more than a working relationship.

Snappy and humorous dialog between Jess and DI George, a well planned plot with a lot of action makes this mystery thriller series one worth reading. I look forward to curling up with future Jess Bridges adventures. Thank you NetGalley for providing me this novel in exchange for an honest review.