MINDFUL OF MURDER

‘Knives Out' meets P.G. Wodehouse, in the hands of a gifted novelist acclaimed for her originality and wit.

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 detaile d 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 do 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.

SUSAN JUBY is the author of eight acclaimed, internationally published titles for middle grade and young adult readers, a memoir, and two novels. She won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for Republic of Dirt, and was nominated for the Edgar Award and the Arthur Ellis Award for Getting the Girl.