Mystery

Book of the Month – July 2026

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The Au Pair

Emma Rous

I don’t usually read mysteries, but this one caught my eye when I was shopping for second-hand books and I decided to give it a try. I can’t say that it’s going to turn me into an avid mystery reader, but it did keep my interest until the very end as I wondered how it was going to turn out.

Mourning the recent death of her father and going through his belongings, Seraphine Mayes discovers an old family photograph that raises dangerous questions. Taken on the midsummer day that Seraphine and her twin brother, Danny, were born at the family estate on the Norfolk coast, the photo shows their mother, surrounded by her husband and her young son, looking serene and holding just one baby.

Who was that baby and why wasn’t the other one in the picture? What caused their mother to throw herself from the nearby cliffs later that same day and why did the family’s au pair flee never to be heard from again? Determined to unravel the mystery and find out the truth about who she really is, Seraphine stirs up a hornet’s nest that puts herself and others in danger and threatens to tear their family apart.

Told in alternating chapters by Seraphine in present day and Laura, the young au pair, twenty-five years earlier, the story kept me turning the pages until I reached the somewhat convoluted climax. It did come to a logical conclusion that answered all Seraphine’s questions, but I found the ending a bit confusing as I tried to keep straight in my mind who all the characters were and how they were related to one another. It was overall an entertaining read though and one that mystery readers would likely enjoy.

The underlying message of the book and one that the author says she hopes her readers will take away from it is that family is about more than genetics.

Book of the month – December 2023

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Homecoming

Kate Morton

61683285I first discovered Australian novelist, Kate Morton, when I found her first three novels in a garage sale several years ago. Since then, I’ve read every book she’s written. When I learned that she’d published a new novel in April of 2023, I immediately put my name on a waiting list with our regional library system. Obviously, Morton’s books are popular because the list was already long and I had to wait many months before Homecoming finally arrived.

I knew when I picked up the book, all 544 pages of it, I would have a hard time putting it down. Thankfully, it came at a time when most of my Christmas preparations were complete and I could sink into the story without too many distractions.

On Christmas Eve 1959, a terrible tragedy rocks the small town of Tambilla in South Australia’s Adelaide Hills. A local man makes a terrible discovery; a mother and three of her children lying dead on a picnic blanket looking as if they are asleep. The youngest child, a baby, has disappeared without a trace.

Almost 60 years later, having lived and worked in London for nearly two decades, journalist Jess Turner-Bridges returns to Australia when her beloved and very elderly grandmother suffers a fall and is seriously ill in hospital. It’s only then that she hears for the first time about the Turner family tragedy of 1959 and begins to try to unravel the mysteries surrounding the deaths and the baby’s disappearance.

Homecoming is an epic novel that spans generations. It’s a gripping story of deeply buried family secrets, sins, and sorrows. It touches on themes of family, motherhood, home, loneliness, loss, identity and belonging. It’s a book you won’t want to put down!