With a title like The Mousetrap Murders, I really wanted to love this book. The premise of the novella is that Julian Gutierrez is sitting on deathrow, waiting for his inevitable execution for the murder of a young college student. He has always maintained his innocence, however few people other than his sister believed him. Then a postcard arrives for Julian from a potential witness who states he knows that Julian is innocent and that he saw the killer. This prompts Julian's sister Val to investigate, determined to find the true killer and save her brother's life.

Sounds like a great plot, right? And it is, so the question is why this book just didn't work for me. Upon reflection, I think that the focus of the book was on cracking the coded clues that the killer left behind. However unless you are really into code-breaking, that isn't where the real interest lies. For many readers, including myself, the interest lies in the human aspect of the story, along with unravelling the mystery.

The characters were not really fleshed out and felt a bit wooden to me. And the immersion in the details of cracking the codes made my eyes glaze over a bit. It just felt like an immense effort to be very clever. In reality I doubt anyone would have ever solved it and poor Julian would have met his maker.

Thanks to NetGalley for the copy to read, but this one was a miss for me.