Aunt Bessie assumes that she’ll have the beach all to herself on a cold, wet, and windy March morning just after sunrise, then she stumbles (almost literally) over a dead body.
Elizabeth (Bessie) Cubbon, aged somewhere between free bus pass (60) and telegram from the Queen (100), has lived her entire adult life in a small cottage on Laxey Beach. For most of those years, she’s been in the habit of taking a brisk morning walk along the beach. Dead men have never been part of the scenery before. Aunt Bessie assumes that the dead man died of natural causes, then the police find the knife in his chest. Try as she might, Bessie just can’t find anything to like about the young widow that she provides tea and sympathy to in the immediate aftermath of finding the body. There isn’t much to like about the rest of the victim’s family either.
Aunt Bessie assumes that the police will have the case wrapped up in no time at all, then she finds a second body. Can Bessie and her friends find the killer before she ends up as the next victim?
Fit only to delete off your Kindle This book was much too expensive, even though it was free. The author is American writing about the Isle of Man and not doing so very convincingly. Do they really eat chocolate chip muffins on the Isle of Man? Do they really use all the same idioms that Americans do? The book does not give one the “feel” of the culture it is set in. Secondly, there is precious little character development. Has the author given no thought at all to what life is like for a little old lady? A fall from a…
Aunt Bessie and the Isle of Man won me over Having never read a mystery set on the Isle of Man, I really looked forward to Aunt Bessie Assumes, and for the most part I was not disappointed. The Isle of Man may be a UK Crown dependency, but it is a country in its own right with its own language and customs. Fortunately author Diana Xarissa realized that many of her book’s readers would want to know more. She included a glossary with some basic Manx (the language of the Isle of Man) words and phrases as well as a section translating…
Disappointing I’d give this series another shot, but didn’t particularly warm to the protagonist at all, nor find the ending even slightly plausible. Spoiler alert: I couldn’t suspend belief so far that I could find any charm in Aunt Bessie’s crotchets, whatsoever, nor imagine she’d be a character so beloved by neighborhood children, nor by any parents if she’d been letting generations of unhappy or tantrum-prone children “run away from home” to stay at her place for brief periods. Aunt Bessie is…