I nearly chose this as my amazon first reads choice but decided on another title, so I was so pleased to get this through Netgalley.
This was so my kind of book, I have a morbid fascination with thrillers about mental asylums but this took forever to get going. I was at 20% before I found out the identity of the murder victim!
Lots of characters with not enough clarity between them made this really challenging, and I found I wasn't engaged fully with wanting to know the ending.

Loved this! Hope she’s writing more for this series!

A body found at an abandoned mental asylum, sold!

This is a whodunit detective story. Kirby is a good lead character. You will like him. He has his personal problems which made it interesting. The story was a little slow, maybe intentional, with many characters to keep track of. Pace certainly picked up when more clues were revealed. It was hard to guess the villain that's for sure, related characters don't even share the same last name....in my book that's cheating.

Ok, you’re going to need a few things before you even THINK about starting this book. First, you will need to read in an environment that is wholly conducive to COMPLETE concentration. Second, you will need, at a minimum, a writing utensil and a sheet of paper, preferably a grid. Better yet, a digital spreadsheet, with an unlimited number of rows and columns. NOW you can sit down and give it a go. Seriously. Without the aforementioned requirements, there is simply no way to track the myriad characters and intersecting plots. After awhile, I simply gave up trying to remember who killed whom, when and where; who gave birth to whom and when. I just wanted to finish the damn thing.

The writing itself is sound—well-constructed sentences and paragraphs. It’s sad when that is the most positive thing I can offer. The characters are one-dimensional and once established begin to behave in ways that are in direct opposition to their development. The plot has more holes than a sponge, and the suspense is lost in a confusing tangle of relationships. So much of what is here is just a series of extraneous subplots—the book would have fared far better without them.

I had high hopes for this one and am still smarting over the bait and switch of the blurb. Pick another way to spend an afternoon.

I do not enjoy murder mysteries with British/English settings and characters. I did not read more than a couple of chapters so please do not judge this book by my personal taste.

A new author for me and an enjoyable enough read. Good storyline after an elderly ex-nurse if found murdered on the site where she used to work. A few too many characters for me but that's a personal thing as I sometimes struggled to remember who and how they linked together. Decent read though and would recommend.

I love finding out the history of abandoned buildings, especially creepy ones such as asylums so I knew that this book would be right up my alley. The author created such a creepy and almost claustrophobic atmosphere with the thick snow in London which added to the suspense of the book.

I did find myself struggling with all the characters and trying to piece it all together in my head as it did become a little confusing near the end, however that may have just been down to me not being in the right headspace for such a complex plot (this slump I’ve been in shows no signs of leaving yet).
We have so many intriguing characters in here that I wanted to create my own investigation board just so I could appreciate them all!
I do hope Connie will make another appearance as I started to warm to her.

The tension and the twists in The Bone Jar made it difficult to put down, it’s a great start to the series and I will definitely be picking up the sequel.

I have been looking forward to reading this book for forever! My TBR list is too long! Arg!

Back on track, this book has all my favorite things, an abandoned asylum, family secrets, and murder, I absolutely loved how interwoven all the characters became.

The only thing that was disappointing for me was finishing the book and wanting more. I like my stories to end packaged up with a nice bow. I'm hoping to see this become a series! Lew Kirby, our lead detective is an interesting character, as is his partner Anderson. The writing was really well done.

A special thank you to NetGalley, Amazon Publishing, and SW Kane for providing me with an ARC.

4.5 STARS

I read this book for a blog tour, so thank you to the blog tour organiser and the author for letting me take part in this tour, and thank you to Netgalley for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I was really looking forward to reading this book because the blurb and the cover really drew me in, I really like mysteries, but I'm quite picky and only like a few that are really centred on the actual investigation with forensic elements and police as well, and this one was exactly that, so I was sure to really enjoy it.

This book gripped me from the start and even though I was quite distracted at the time I was reading it for various reasons, it kept drawing me in and really held my attention when I was able to read. I thought that the setting with the asylum and the murder possibly being linked to something that happened while the asylum was still running was really interesting and I enjoyed this plot a lot.

In this book, we follow detective Lew Kirby as he is trying to piece together the murders and also try to find the culprit, as well as he is dealing with his own family issues. We also have Connie Darke who is having to deal with the same things and trying to find her friend Ed who has disappeared. As well as these two, we have Raymond who is an ex-patient of the institute, is still living on the grounds, and the title of the book is linked to his character, but I won't say more about it. I really appreciated that we got these three characters as well as the investigation because it made the book more complex and really gave us some intriguing subplots that kept me reading right through! I'm really hoping there are going to be more books, hopefully, a detective series, because I want to know more about these characters.

I wasn't expecting that ending and I definitely think there is potential for more books as even though I thought the crimes in themselves had been well wrapped up and the threads tied up and explained, something happens at the end that makes you think there is going to be more, so I'm really intrigued to find out.

I thought this was a great book, I really liked the backdrop of the asylum, and I thought that some of the subplots that were explored in this book, that were linked to the asylum and these three characters were really important topics and I found them to be really interesting. I do usually really like mysteries, and this was definitely the type of mysteries that I really enjoy.

I gave this book 4.5 stars, I really enjoyed it, it was a great mystery with a great plot, the characters were really relatable and well developed, the story was well written and kept me entertained right through. It was just missing that 5-star feel, but I did really enjoy it and would highly recommend.