{"id":6754,"date":"2025-11-22T09:29:06","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T17:29:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=6754"},"modified":"2025-11-22T09:29:06","modified_gmt":"2025-11-22T17:29:06","slug":"valerie-wilson-wesley-the-mysterious-death-of-junetta-plum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/valerie-wilson-wesley-the-mysterious-death-of-junetta-plum\/","title":{"rendered":"Valerie Wilson Wesley: The Mysterious Death of Junetta Plum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Series Debut<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Harriet Stone is named for Harriet Tubman – the legendary Tubman had saved her father from slavery (he referred to her as \u201cthe General\u201d). Our Harriet is intrepid and courageous, though she herself may not quite be aware of it.\u00a0 Set in 1926, she’s has lost most of her family as well as her fianc\u00e9e to the Spanish flu, and she\u2019s in charge of the orphaned Lovey, who is not quite young enough to be her daughter and not quite old enough to be her sister.\u00a0 Their relationship teeters between the two designations.<\/p>\n

Out of the blue (and at the end of her rope) Harriet gets a letter from a cousin she\u2019s never heard of, Junetta Plum, who offers her a room in her boarding house, telling her \u201cI board single women trying to make a way in this hard old world.\u201d\u00a0 So Harriet and Lovey set off from Connecticut to Harlem, where, Junetta informs her. \u201cnow is the time to come.\u00a0 Everything is new and beginning, yet nothing is ever as it seems.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the exhausted Harriet and Lovey arrive, Junetta greets them at the train station, and once home in Harlem, offers them a tiny room in the attic for their first night, telling them she will change them to a better room the next day.\u00a0 For Junetta, that next day never comes, as she\u2019s discovered dead in the morning, apparently stabbed.<\/p>\n

Harriet discovers the house is now hers, and with that inheritance comes both responsibility, resentments, boarders, a hostile cook and housekeeper, as well as neighbors and others who were in Junetta\u2019s life.\u00a0 While Junetta leaves the canvas of the novel so soon, it\u2019s her personality and Harriet\u2019s attempt to find out more about her that guides the novel.\u00a0 Junetta is as much a character as Harriet.<\/p>\n

Lovey and the cook, Tulip, quickly form a bond, with Tulip making her cookies.\u00a0 Tulip, however, is suspicious and resentful of Harriet, a cousin she\u2019d never seen or heard of, and while the relationship between the two women moving forward remains to be figured out, so does the situation with the boarders, who make the big Victorian house in Harlem affordable. Luckily there are also allies on Harriet\u2019s side \u2013 one is an African American cop, Hoyt, who comes to the scene of Junetta\u2019s death, and there’s also a neighbor couple.\u00a0 The husband is a lawyer who helps Harriet through some of the legal necessities after a death, and the wife, Theo, takes Lovey under her wing.<\/p>\n

This is a slice of time and a location I knew very little about before opening this book, and Wilson\u2019s gift is to immerse the reader in a fully realized and lived location, one that feels completely authentic.\u00a0 She\u2019s also a bit of a genius with character and the situations in the book make the characters more fully realized, drawing emotion from the reader.\u00a0 I enjoyed getting to know Harriet as she parses the circumstances of both Junetta\u2019s life and death.\u00a0 She is fearless and intelligent, and when she realizes this fact, she sets her mind to solving the crime, which the police are content to dismiss as a suicide.<\/p>\n

This is a densely populated book though the characters are all memorable, and the plot is never confusing.\u00a0 Some writers don\u2019t handle secondary characters well, not fleshing them out adequately, but Wesley brings her touch to every person she writes about, to the great advantage of this novel.\u00a0 At the end I felt I had been immersed in 1926 Harlem, and I loved getting to know the brave and bold Harriet. —\u00a0Robin Agnew<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Series Debut Harriet Stone is named for Harriet Tubman – the legendary Tubman had saved her father from slavery (he referred to her as \u201cthe General\u201d). Our Harriet is intrepid and courageous, though she herself may not quite be aware of it.\u00a0 Set in 1926, she’s has lost most of her family as well as … 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":[2317,10,162,1276,1441,2316,767],"class_list":["post-6754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-1920s-harlem","tag-historical","tag-kensington-books","tag-robin-agnew","tag-series-debut","tag-the-mysterious-death-of-junetta-plum","tag-valerie-wilson-wesley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6754","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=6754"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6828,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6754\/revisions\/6828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}