Minnie Harper #1
This lovely, sparkling book is set on Corfu in 1898. It’s the story of widowed Minnie, raising two kids on her own. Minnie is British but her husband chose Corfu for them, and the family was very happy there together. His dying request was for Minnie never to send the children back to England. While Minnie’s son, Tommy, is young and more than entranced by the copious insect and amphibian population, her daughter Cleo is a teen who has reached the eye rolling stage. I doubt that’s what it was called in 1898, but you know what I mean. Cleo is longing to go away to school.
While Minnie has been left with a house, it’s in some disrepair and money is tight. So, when a friend suggests her as a typist to a mystery writer who has rented a home not far from her own, she takes the job, despite finding the man somewhat prickly and annoying. He’s a well known mystery writer, Stephen Dorian, who would have been a contemporary of Conan Doyle. While Minnie feels she’s above popular fiction, as she types, she finds herself drawn to both the prose and reluctantly, to Stephen himself.
When Minnie and Stephen have an argument one morning, she heads to the beach and discovers the body of a young Greek maid she had encountered and spoken to a few times. She’s devastated, and when she feels the police aren’t giving the case their full attention, she begins to ask questions herself, finding that she’s often accompanied by Stephen who agrees with her assessment.
While the book is definitely a mystery much of it centers on the relationship between Minnie and Stephen, which is an interesting one. Minnie is widowed, devoted to her husband’s memory; Stephen is recently and painfully divorced. It’s the reason he’s fled to Corfu. Neither want to remarry, but they do find a friendship that both of them seem to have needed. Stephen even befriends Tommy.
The highlight of the book, to me, was when Minnie and Stephen take a detecting trip to a nearby island to ask questions of the dead girl’s aunt. They discover quite a lot and then find themselves stranded on this island overnight. It both strengthens and ultimately destroys their new friendship – or does it? That hopefully is the story of the next novel.
This is a first mystery for Emily Sullivan, who has written historical romance. That is a clear strength of the novel, but the mystery part is also well done, clever, and well set up. The clues are there for an astute reader to winkle out. I rarely try to figure out whodunnit myself and I was pleasantly surprised by the ending. Sullivan also leaves the reader with a bit of a cliffhanger, so I am already looking forward to book two. — Robin Agnew