Mindful of Murder

Meet Helen Thorpe. She’s smart, preternaturally calm, deeply insightful and a freshly trained butler. On the day she is supposed to start her career as an unusually equanimous domestic professional serving one of the wealthiest families in the world, she is called back to a spiritual retreat where she used to work, the Yatra Institute, on one of British Columbia’s gulf islands. The owner of the lodge, Helen’s former employer Edna, has died while on a three-month silent self-retreat, leaving Helen instructions to settle her affairs.

But Edna’s will is more detailed than most, and getting things in order means Helen must run the retreat for a select group to determine which of Edna’s relatives will inherit the institute. Helen’s classmates, newly minted butlers themselves, decide they can’t let her go it alone and arrive to help Helen pull things off. After all, is there anything three butlers can’t handle? As Helen carries out the will’s instructions, she begins to think that someone had reason to want Edna dead. A reluctantly suspicious investigator, Helen and her band of butlers find themselves caught up in the mystery.

Genre: Mystery

"No one but Susan Juby would come up with the concept of a Buddhist butler detective, then execute it so beautifully. This novel has all the whimsical characters and charm we've come to know and love from Juby, but this time wrapped in a murder/mystery. I want to say it's reminiscent of #1 Ladies' Detective Agency or The Thursday Murder Club, yet it is so entirely unique; a perfect novel to curl up with in front of a fire with a cozy blanket and a mug of tea. I hope this is the first in a long series." - Susin Nielsen