{"id":6363,"date":"2025-04-13T05:08:30","date_gmt":"2025-04-13T12:08:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=6363"},"modified":"2025-04-13T05:08:30","modified_gmt":"2025-04-13T12:08:30","slug":"emily-sullivan-a-death-on-corfu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/emily-sullivan-a-death-on-corfu\/","title":{"rendered":"Emily Sullivan: A Death on Corfu"},"content":{"rendered":"

Minnie Harper #1<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>This lovely, sparkling book is set on Corfu in 1898.\u00a0 It\u2019s the story of widowed Minnie, raising two kids on her own.\u00a0 Minnie is British but her husband chose Corfu for them, and the family was very happy there together.\u00a0 His dying request was for Minnie never to send the children back to England.\u00a0 While Minnie\u2019s 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.\u00a0 I doubt that\u2019s what it was called in 1898, but you know what I mean.\u00a0 Cleo is longing to go away to school.<\/p>\n

While Minnie has been left with a house, it\u2019s in some disrepair and money is tight.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He\u2019s a well known mystery writer, Stephen Dorian, who would have been a contemporary of Conan Doyle.\u00a0 While Minnie feels she\u2019s above popular fiction, as she types, she finds herself drawn to both the prose and reluctantly, to Stephen himself.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 She\u2019s devastated, and when she feels the police aren\u2019t giving the case their full attention, she begins to ask questions herself, finding that she\u2019s often accompanied by Stephen who agrees with her assessment.<\/p>\n

While the book is definitely a mystery much of it centers on the relationship between Minnie and Stephen, which is an interesting one.\u00a0 Minnie is widowed, devoted to her husband\u2019s memory; Stephen is recently and painfully divorced.\u00a0 It\u2019s the reason he\u2019s fled to Corfu. Neither want to remarry, but they do find a friendship that both of them seem to have needed.\u00a0 Stephen even befriends Tommy.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s aunt.\u00a0 They discover quite a lot and then find themselves stranded on this island overnight.\u00a0 It both strengthens and ultimately destroys their new friendship \u2013 or does it?\u00a0 That hopefully is the story of the next novel.<\/p>\n

This is a first mystery for Emily Sullivan, who has written historical romance.\u00a0 That is a clear strength of the novel, but the mystery part is also well done, clever, and well set up.\u00a0 The clues are there for an astute reader to winkle out.\u00a0 I rarely try to figure out whodunnit myself and I was pleasantly surprised by the ending.\u00a0 Sullivan also leaves the reader with a bit of a cliffhanger, so I am already looking forward to book two.\u00a0\u00a0— Robin Agnew<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Minnie Harper #1 This lovely, sparkling book is set on Corfu in 1898.\u00a0 It\u2019s the story of widowed Minnie, raising two kids on her own.\u00a0 Minnie is British but her husband chose Corfu for them, and the family was very happy there together.\u00a0 His dying request was for Minnie never to send the children back … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2071,2070,2068,2069,10,162,1276],"class_list":["post-6363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-1898-greece","tag-a-death-on-corfu","tag-corfu","tag-emily-sullivan","tag-historical","tag-kensington-books","tag-robin-agnew"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6363"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6365,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6363\/revisions\/6365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}