Murder Takes a Vacation

The 68-year-old protagonist of Murder Takes a Vacation, Mrs. Muriel Blossom is an affluent widow whose experience in surveillance and sharp eye for detail make her ideally suited to untangle the murder mystery that complicates her two-week vacation in France. Self-conscious since childhood about her weight, Mrs. Blossom counts herself lucky to have met her “soul mate,” her late husband Harold, early in life. Marrying at the early age of 20, Mrs. Blossom forged a long, loving relationship with Harold that ended only with his sudden death 10 years earlier. After his passing, Mrs. Blossom worked for several years as an assistant to Tess Monaghan, a private investigator in Mrs. Blossom’s hometown of Baltimore, where she discovered a talent for shadowing suspects without being noticed. 

Inherently shy and self-effacing, Mrs. Blossom feels that she often “blends” into her surroundings, an asset to her surveillance work but a liability to her social life. For decades, she has felt like a secondary character (or “sidekick”) in her own life, often subordinating her own ambitions and desires to those of others, whether as a wife, mother, grandmother, or friend. The novel refers to the protagonist as “Mrs. Blossom” throughout, a reflection of her own sense of her identity as tied to Harold’s, even after his death.