Not sure what sparked my interest in this title, but I'm glad it did.

The narration of the events are told by Blanche, who is hiding out from the police. She takes up as domestic help to a wealthy southern family going to the country estate. Seems like a great place to hide, no one was expecting her and no one pays attention to the help.

Blanche herself is full of insight and humor and compassion. A completely likable character. And the family that she works for? Wooo Eeee, what a disaster.

Fantastic mystery. A little slow to start (I was about 50% in before the mystery really kicked in and I was fully engaged), but I loved Blanche and was surprised at what was really going on with the family who employed her.

This book also confirmed to me that I want to mostly read #ownvoices books. Not that authors should limit themselves to only writing characters of their own race, but because Blanche represents a viewpoint of “the help” that was entirely missing from The Help as written by a white author. This book widened my perspective and entertained me, highly recommend!

Um policial focado na história dos personagens, nas suas personalidades, nos seus desejos e escolhas, o tipo de narrativa policial que eu gosto de ler.

There's a sort of condescension glommed onto the (mostly white) marketers of Black creatives which holds that some sort of fictional media by them with themes of racial prejudice blocking the hero's path makes it the next Get Out. Get Out's a great movie that deserves its laudations but Black writers have been using genres to address the racism they feel for a long time.

Barbara Neely does that here. Strip it of its context and it's a cozy mystery: a maid solving a small town crime within the confines of the home she works in. But Neely is telling the bigger story of racism in the south. Misogynoir, labor, even ableism all get addressed in this packed book that, while overwritten and a bit too expository, is still quite an engaging read.

I would be annoyed otherwise with the fact that Blanche unraveled most of the mystery while quietly leaning into closed doors and listening. This has been in the mystery writers bag of tricks for generations and is usually an ill-conceived shortcut. However, it goes to exactly the story Neely wants to tell: Black women are usually invisible, especially when they are The Help. They are seen when food needs to be delivered, laundry washed, medicine administered, and they are otherwise not felt or heard. Blanche uses this to her advantage and its clever.

I was hoping the story would be more streamlined but I appreciated what Barbara Neely was doing. I'd like to read more to see how her writing evolves in this series.

I love her, I love Mumsfield, I loved getting a contemporaneous view of race and class in the early '90s from the perspective of a Black woman working in domestic care in the South. I can't wait to read the rest of this series.

Barbara Neely brings a fresh perspective to the traditionally white genre of cozy murders and amateur detectives. Set in the “post-racial south” of the United States, Blanche White is an African American maid who risks being accused of murder by asking too many questions. Great story - I can’t wait to read the next book in this series.

I really really liked Blanche and her whole style. She was awesome as a protagonist. I didn't really like the ending though. Not who the murderer was, that was fine and I was rooting for that. But how it was revealed rubbed me the wrong way, it seemed too easy. But on the way there, we got a really awesome plot twist, which I didn't guess in advance! A bit of a mixed bag in the end. The prose was really beautiful though, and the country house in which the book is set is almost another character.

“He was a rich white male. Being in possession of that particular set of characteristics meant a person could do pretty much anything he wanted to do, to pretty much anybody he chose. Like an untrained dog, chewing and shitting all over the place. Blanche was sure having all that power made many men crazy.” [Barbara Neely, 1992]

Well, I’m glad THAT has changed in the intervening 28 years! (Sigh.)

The audiobook is very well done. This is a fresh take on the “domestic servant who no one takes seriously solves all the crimes” format with a Southern racial backdrop. Blanche is complicated and not as blandly good as most main characters in books like these.