THE LIFE CYCLE OF THE COMMON OCTOPUS, by Emma Knight

As a British reader, I am admittedly fussy when it comes to mysteries that take place on labyrinthine country estates. “The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus,” Emma Knight’s debut novel set in Scotland, initially had my trope and tartan radar blinking. Fearing another entry into the buzzy “cozy fiction” genre, I instead found a winsome tale of one young woman’s coming-of-age.

Penelope “Pen” Winters — a bookish stick-in-the-mud with the “skittish flinch of a black house cat” — is a Canadian first-year student at the University of Edinburgh, where she has matriculated with her childhood friend, Alice. She’s scarred by her parents’ divorce and desperate to learn more about the youth her father spent in Britain, so, finally independent at college, she contacts an old friend of his, the famous novelist Lord Elliot Lennox, who also happens to live in Scotland. “I have pieced together some clues over the years, and they all lead to you,” she writes, believing Lennox has some connection to her parents’ split. Lennox, suspiciously eager to help, invites Pen to his Saltburn-esque castle.

It is an undeniably delicious premise: A foreign student nervously pads up the parquet stairs of a Scottish country pile, looking for a family secret. A gorgeous son, Sasha Lennox, appears, and their hands brush as he helps Pen carry her bags. A zany cast of Lennoxes pops out of wood-paneled rooms. Pen soon realizes she is “a bit in love with all of them.”

There’s a disastrous hunting trip, oil portraits of ancestors, a “persona non grata” hidden relative (thankfully, the “Bertha in the attic” allusion ends there). Just as I was about to roll my eyes at what could have been a predictable story within a tired pastiche of upper-crust life, I softened. The concept of a stranger lurking among a complicated aristocratic clan, “with all their tempests and teapots,” is far from new, but it’s such fun here. And the book is filled with literary references. There are nods to “Brideshead Revisited,” “Never Let Me Go,” “Macbeth” and more. Jilly Cooper gets a mention, naturally.