The Primrose in Stacy Hackney’s new cosy mystery is a residential hotel in Richmond, Virginia for people 55 and over. Whatever you might expect, these folks are not ready for a retiring lifestyle. For them, the best time of the day is the cocktail hour, which for some starts around 10am. Naturally, their favourite dish is gossip.
Due to fraud allegations against her husband and an impending divorce, 30-something Lila Shaw and her 10-year-old daughter, Bea, have lost their house in Norfolk, Virginia, their friends and their country club lifestyle. Lila’s lost her job, and Bea has been expelled from private school. They are moving a hundred miles north of that social and legal disaster into the Primrose, but only temporarily, while Lila clears out the apartment of a former resident. One look at the apartment reveals it will be a job requiring a fleet of dumpsters.
Not much pleases Bea at this age, as she precociously enters the angsty preteen years. She’s particularly unhappy about the disappearance of her father, ‘the fun parent.’ But dad has left the country to avoid arrest, and Lila doesn’t know when or if he’ll reappear. As he scurried out of their lives, he announced he wants a divorce.
The feisty Bea is a true crime aficionado, so, even though the Primrose is a step down for them, it has the irresistible attraction of being a murder site. The granddaughter of a wealthy resident died at the Primrose 21 years prior. Sophia Kent’s murder has never been solved. Within days of the Shaws’ arrival, the grandfather dies, and in his will leaves a reward of $2 million to anyone who can solve this very cold case.
Bea is determined to investigate and, despite her mother’s objections, soon enlists two of their new neighbours in her sleuthing. One is a retired police detective and the other an irascible woman few of the Primrosians get along with. Still, she’s unaccountably taken a liking to Bea.
You can imagine all the ways this caper might go wrong, as does Lila. But she is gradually sucked in because, finally, Bea has found something she truly enjoys, and the money, however unlikely it is to come to them, would make their lives so much easier. You probably also would expect that asking questions of testy old folks and trawling for secrets might lead to trouble or even a second murder. But you may not expect that Lila, the most reluctant of this investigative foursome, would end up the principal suspect in a new death.
Lila seems almost incapable of sticking up for herself, almost annoyingly at times. She exemplifies a certain kind of woman – a throwback to the passive females of decades ago. Her diffidence is partly why her husband was able to get away with so much without her raising any questions, like, where’s all this money coming from?; it’s why her unsympathetic mother infantilises her; and it’s why Bea runs rings around her.
Now that she’s truly at one of life’s low points, Lila does have legitimate worries about her and Bea’s future and doubts about her own capacity. Just about the only time Lila sticks up for herself, she confronts a newspaper reporter who took her seat in a Starbucks. Yet, there’s something about this man and Lila’s uncharacteristic reaction to him that makes you hope he’ll show up again. And he does.
Bea’s single-mindedness keeps pushing Lila along, and their relationship is both painful and joyful as they move through various emotional states and stages. Lila always relied on her wealthy husband to smooth life’s path for her, and here you see her starting to take some steps on her own. Not without a lot of self-doubt, but progress nonetheless.
There are many light moments and much good humour involved in the Primrose residents’ personalities, their interactions with each other, and their relationships to Lila and Bea. Also, author Stacy Hackney makes some pointed jabs at the cultural inhibitions of Virginians and Southerners in general. At least one of these traits plays a part in the investigation, when Lila detects an insult floating beneath a surface of excessive politeness. Constraints against discussing anything unpleasant has hidden valuable information from the police for years.
You’ll find The Primrose Murder Society a charming story a welcome respite from the gloom and doom of the daily news!
Also try The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman, if you haven’t already, or Robert Thorogood’s The Mysterious Affair of Judith Potts.
William Morrow
Print/Kindle/iBook
£10.85
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
