Mindful of Murder

A Novel

By: Susan Juby

Narrated by: Lisa Larsen

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.

©2022 Susan Juby (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

Interesting premise, great audio

The premise was unusual & interesting and the story kept my attention all the way through. The voice performance was first rate & well suited to the material.

For those with little interest in Buddhist thought & practice, these parts of the story can drag. The actual detection plays fair with the reader, and it is possible to identify the killer before the end.