Sunday, June 26, 2016

Goodbye, Ms. Chips

This is the first Ellie Haskell mystery novel I have read.  It is a fun entertaining mystery novel.  A good summer or beach read.  You do need to be able to concentrate a bit though because there seem to be so many characters.  it was a bit hard to keep them all straight, who was friends with who and who had had a run in with who.  this mystery takes place on a school campus.  It is the boarding school that Ellie went to as a young girl.  She has her own demons to release while she is again on campus after all these years.  As other women from her past come to join her at the school many old quarrels come to light.  The women now more mature and settled in their lives can work through the old arguments and let go of the past.  Well most of them can, but not all of them do.

Dorothy Cannell has written many more Ellie Haskel mystery novels before this one.   I cannot speak from experience about the main characters in her books, but Ellie Haskell seems to be an interesting amateur detective who is in real life an interior designer.  She is married to a restaurant chef, who must be a really great husband because he was very supportive in this book about letting Ellie go off and he stayed home with the two children.

What seems to start out as just a case of a missing trophy, turns to murder when a school girl prank goes desperately wrong.  As at most boarding schools there is a long held ghost story that travels through time from one class of girls to the next.  There are girls who are bullies and use the story to their advantage to scare the girls who are easily intimidated, homesick or not in the popular groups at school.

I will probably be looking into reading some of the other Ellie Haskell mysteries in the series in the near future.

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