Book review: Labyrinthine plot a lottery offering a frothy concoction

With a fire, an insurance claim, a vengeful action, and a whole series of ‘coincidences’ experienced by Mrs Blossom, you’ve got quite a mystery

Laura Lippman has given us a mostly silly beach read. File photo: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images

• Murder Takes a Vacation
• Laura Lippman
• Faber & Faber, £9.99

This mystery story involving a missing multimillion-dollar artefact is, for all its high stakes and cast of colourful, sometimes alarming characters, mostly silly.

It’s a beach read that stars Mrs Muriel Blossom, a widow who for the first time in her life (she’s 68), leaves America for a cruise along the Seine in Paris. Although a benign character, she is annoying. Her naivety is stupendous. And as for her tendency towards self-loathing (the reader is regularly reminded that Mrs Blossom is fat and getting old), it’s overegged. 

The author explains in a note at the end of the novel that she has been trying to educate herself on “antifat activism” and wanted to write about a character “who happened to be fat in the culture in which we now live”. 

But in fairness to Mrs Blossom, who first appeared in Lippman’s novel Another Thing to Fall in 2008, she hasn’t fully ruled herself out of the chances of romance. She shares a passionate kiss with a man called Allan whom she met on the airplane journey from Washington to Europe.

This charming lawyer gives her a pill to help her sleep on the flight. Why did he want her knocked out for hours? (And how did he fall to his death from a hotel balcony not long after his encounter with Mrs Blossom?) 

It’s the start of a new life for Mrs Blossom. She picked up a cast-aside lottery ticket on the ground in a garage forecourt back home and went on to claim $8.75m. 

But she still frets about money. “Mrs Blossom found money stranger than love and more shameful than sex.” 

She was happily married to Harold who protected her from over-indulging her two weaknesses; food and sex. Mrs Blossom is an unlikely candidate for hedonism. But she does regret not sleeping with Allan, fearing he may have been her last-chance saloon in the love game.

She feels largely invisible (as befits a 60-something woman playing to type) but says that is why she was such a good private detective. In truth, she worked for a private detective years ago, in a minor role (in the Tess Monaghan private investigator books by Lippman.) 

But this self-effacing, self-conscious woman becomes an unlikely heroine, starring as the main character in her own life, as one of the cruise passengers predicts.

A well-written concoction, but definitely more frothy than scary.

That cruise passenger, Pat Siemen, is crucial to the plot. Pat believes Mrs Blossom has something that she wants. While Pat befriends Mrs Blossom and genuinely likes her, she has a man in her life - supposedly her brother, Marko, who is obsessed with money - driving Pat to extremes. 

Marko romances Elinor (Mrs Blossom’s best friend who is her guest on the cruise). Elinor has had three husbands and, definitely not playing to type, this sexagenarian is on the lookout for another man.

There are moments of levity between Mrs Blossom and Elinor, who can come over all girly and nervy around men. But the dynamics of this friendship are dealt with superficially. The plot is the thing, and it is fairly labyrinthine.

Don’t let the lottery money that Mrs Blossom pocketed divert your attention too much, though a woman in possession of a fortune can be a vulnerable being. Instead, the focus is on the valuable artefact, a statue of a bird with sapphires for eyes.

Throw into the mix a fire, an insurance claim, a vengeful action, and a whole series of ‘coincidences’ experienced by Mrs Blossom, and you’ve got quite a mystery. It’s a well-written concoction, but definitely more frothy than scary.

BOOKS & MORE

Check out our Books Hub where you will find the latest news, reviews, features, opinions and analysis on all things books from the Irish Examiner's team of specialist writers, columnists and contributors.