Murder Takes a Vacation

Laura Lippman

WHEN an unexpected lottery win makes American widow Muriel Blossom a multi-millionaire, she books her first ever flight out of the States and invites a lifelong friend to join her on one of the famous river cruises through Paris.

But just twenty-four hours into Mrs Blossom’s transatlantic trip, a man she befriended at Heathrow airport is dead, a precious artefact is missing, and a mysterious stranger is claiming that her life is in danger. The relaxing vacation is fast turning into a deadly international mystery that it seems only she can solve.

Fans of multi-award-winning US author Laura Lippman (pictured below) – recognised as one of today’s most impressive crime novelists – turns her prodigious talents to a brilliant debut cosy crime romp starring a character who loomed large (in more ways than one!) in the author’s bestselling Private Investigator Tess Monaghan series. Remembered by fans as the famously plump and grandmotherly surveillance assistant to the unorthodox detective Monaghan, Mrs Blossom gets a new and more vigorous lease of life in this playful, charming and thoroughly entertaining mystery adventure which sees the feisty widow throw off her mumsy flowery dresses for caftans, plunging necklines and bright fuchsia wedges as she tracks down not just some elusive villains but her future happiness.

‘I’m good at watching people because I’m invisible. Like most women my age.’ 

Sixty-eight-year-old Muriel Blossom from Baltimore has a knack for blending into the background, which was an asset during her days assisting private investigator Monaghan. 

But when she finds a lottery ticket ‘dancing’ in the breeze in a parking lot, everything changes. She has won a staggering $8.75m and is determined to see the world that she sometimes feels is passing her by.

So Mrs Blossom has booked a Seine river cruise on the MS Solitaire and has landed at Heathrow waiting for an onward flight to Paris where her friend Elinor will join her a week later. What she doesn’t expect when her flight is delayed is to meet silver-haired and handsome Allan Turner, a lawyer from Columbia who is on the way to work appointments in London.

He is the first man who has sparked something inside Mrs Blossom since her beloved husband died ten years ago and they spend the evening together. It’s a short-lived friendship however because Allan is found dead just twenty-four hours later after falling from a hotel balcony in Paris, a city he wasn’t even supposed to be in.

It’s unsettling to say the least and Mrs Blossom doesn’t know who to trust on board the cruise ship, especially when a mysterious man called Danny Johnson, who claims to be a stylist and personal shopper, keeps popping up around every corner and is always present when things start going awry. Danny is convinced that Allan was transporting a stolen piece of art and that Mrs Blossom knows more than she is letting on.

Surrounded by luxury food, quaint towns and people with a staggeringly high net worth, and possessed of the feeling that she is being followed, Mrs Blossom must take things into her own hands. And maybe blending into the background has its perks… because whoever is responsible will never see this most unlikely of detectives coming.

Murder Takes a Vacation is as much about Mrs Blossom’s rollercoaster and often emotionally charged journey into a new way of looking at life as an intriguing and perilous crime mystery set against the alluring backdrop of the many wondrous streets and sights of Paris.

Employing her trademark elegant writing, breathtakingly clever plotting skills and mischievous humour, Lippman weaves her way through the complexities of a slowly unfolding international crime conspiracy whilst exploring tough and very human topics like grief, ageing, body image and the ‘invisibility’ of older women. At the centre of all the all the drama, fun and skulduggery lies the unforgettable blossoming of Mrs Blossom, a woman who married at twenty, was widowed before she was aged sixty, and is now learning that the pursuit of happiness doesn’t have to end when you lose your long-time life partner.

For Lippman, reviving and re-imaginaing Mrs Blossom was a labour of love and a chance to pay penance for the ‘sin’ of over-egging her weight issue in earlier appearances. Thus the new-look Mrs Blossom is still delightfully rotund but has no desire now to change her body and is ‘strong, sexy, smart, and vital.’ As Lippman tells us in her author’s note, ‘As someone who often writes about terrible people, I loved every minute I spent with Muriel Blossom.’ It’s almost certain that readers, too, are going to love every minute they spend with the utterly marvellous, conspicuously courageous and super-sleuthing Muriel…
(Faber & Faber, paperback, £9.99)