Isabella Muir

Isabella Muir has a fascination for the past – exploring what it was like for families living through the decades from the 1930s through to the 1960s and beyond. She is the author of two crime mystery series, both set in Sussex, in the iconic eras of the 1960s and 1970s, as well several novellas set during the Second World War.

Researching all aspects of family life in past decades formed the perfect launch pad for her works of fiction. Isabella rediscovered her love of writing fiction during two happy years working on and completing her MA in Professional Writing and since then has gone to publish seven novels, six novellas and two short story collections.

Her love of Italy shines through all her work and, as she is half-Italian, she has enjoyed bringing all her crime novels to an Italian audience with Italian translations, which are very well received.

A Notable Omission is the fourth novel in Isabella’s Sussex Crime Mystery series featuring young librarian and amateur sleuth, Janie Juke. Set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the fictional seaside town of Tamarisk Bay, we meet Janie, who looks after the mobile library. She is an avid lover of Agatha Christie stories – in particular Hercule Poirot – using all she has learned from the Queen of Crime to help solve crimes and mysteries. As well as four novels, there are six novellas in the series, which explore some of the back story to the Tamarisk Bay characters.

Her second series of Sussex Crimes features retired Italian detective, Giuseppe Bianchi. The first Giuseppe Bianchi mystery - Crossing the Line - introduces us to Giuseppe on the day he arrives in the quiet seaside town of Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, to find a dead body on the beach and so the story begins. In the second novel in the series, After the Storm, we find Giuseppe helping to sift through the devastation and piecing together the tragic events left behind in the storm’s wake.

Isabella’s standalone novel, The Forgotten Children, deals with the emotive subject of the child migrants who were sent to Australia – again focusing on family life in the 1960s, when the child migrant policy was still in force.