Before She Was Helen
Fiction
Poisoned Pen Press
September, 8, 2020
Hardcover
320
Purchased
When Clemmie goes next door to check on her difficult and unlikeable neighbor Dom, he isn't there. But something else is. Something stunning, beautiful and inexplicable. Clemmie photographs the wondrous object on her cell phone and makes the irrevocable error of forwarding it. As the picture swirls over the internet, Clemmie tries desperately to keep a grip on her own personal network of secrets. Can fifty years of careful hiding under names not her own be ruined by one careless picture?
And although what Clemmie finds is a work of art, what the police find is a body. . . in a place where Clemmie wasn't supposed to be, and where she left her fingerprints. Suddenly, the bland, quiet life Clemmie has built for herself in her sleepy South Carolina retirement community comes crashing down as her dark past surges into the present.
My review:
I just adored this story of Clemmie and how she attracts trouble like a magnet, while not even asking for it! I've seen some up and down reviews for this one, so let me preface this review by theorizing that perhaps you need to be "of a certain age" for it to resonate as much as it did with me. The stories about the retirement community where Clemmie lives, along with the goings on of her neighbors, had me laughing out loud and nodding my head. I should mention that I am not in a retirement community (yet), but there are several around where I live, and the observations from what I've gleaned were spot on. Of course, while I may have been chuckling at the antics, this book does have a mystery side, which is not at all funny. A dead body shows up in the unit next door to where Clemmie lives, and of course she may be a suspect. Then that will bring to light her involvement in another death that occurred back in her hometown decades before. Lots of moving parts and characters kept me guessing as to who committed the crime in this one, and I had a ball witnessing Clemmie get out of one scrape after another!
This is a really fun one! I'm not sure that the word fun is appropriate when it's a book about a couple of murders, but I was so entertained throughout, that is what I'm calling it. Highly recommend, especially for those in "that age group" 🙂
