{"id":3195,"date":"2023-10-05T16:41:26","date_gmt":"2023-10-05T16:41:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=3195"},"modified":"2025-04-03T15:38:56","modified_gmt":"2025-04-03T15:38:56","slug":"the-expectant-detectives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=3195","title":{"rendered":"The Expectant Detectives"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Bridget Jones meets <em>Thursday Murder Club<\/em> in this tale of rural English women who meet in a prenatal class and learn far more than how to not kill your partner while the baby\u2019s making its debut. The central character and narrator is Alice, who, she tells us, thought she\u2019d surprise her boyfriend for his 30th birthday with a pregnancy. It\u2019s a happy if slightly puzzling surprise, as Alice has little idea how to care for a baby and she\u2019s terrified of birth. The overly chipper and hippy teacher of the class, whose clothes resemble \u201ca chameleon caught in a kaleidoscope,\u201d isn\u2019t much help. Even less helpful is that one of the students gives birth during the class (would a first baby be that fast? Eh, it\u2019s Bridget Jones with a baby. Moving on). And after that, the owner of the store downstairs from the class is found very dead. The rest of the class is still pregnant and they spend their time lumbering around the \u201cposh hippy\u201d town of Penton (\u201cPopulation: seventeen people and a cow\u201d) puzzling out village relationships, past scandals, and the intricacies of cloth diapers. <strong>This fun romp offers hilarious moments while taking on some real-life issues<\/strong>: the fear involved in becoming a first-time parent and the shadows of one\u2019s own upbringing that can darken parenthood, all while Alice and friends undertake the whodunit. Ailes\u2019s sequel, the perfectly named <em>Dead Tired<\/em>, meets the characters again after they\u2019ve had their babies and will be out on the heels of this one, on June 4, 2024.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bridget Jones meets Thursday Murder Club in this tale of rural English women who meet in a prenatal class and learn far more than how to not kill your partner&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":3197,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[76,180,55,56],"class_list":["post-3195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-cozy","tag-debut","tag-mystery-detective","tag-women-sleuths"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Expectant-1-400x400.jpg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Expectant-1-400x600.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"Henrietta Thornton","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=4"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}