Spotlight Amazon book description...
Remote. Mysterious. Deadly.
Situated off the Normandy coast, Mont-Saint Michel has been many things in its history: a prison, a siege fortress and an abbey. When Maggie and Laurent—who are struggling with the revelation of a family secret that threatens their marriage—take part in a couples’ counseling weekend on the island they are thrust head first into the setting for a brutal double murder. Because a once-in-a-century storm is bearing down on the island preventing communication with the outside world, their small group of six is trapped on the island—with a murderer. And the clock is ticking. Maggie has only one night to find the killer—and elicit a confession—before the police arrive and go with the obvious evidence—all of which points directly at Laurent. This book is a clean read: no graphic violence, sex or strong language Genre: light culinary cozy mystery, women amateur sleuth. Murder in Mont St-Michel: A riveting mystery thriller set in Provence (A Maggie Newberry Mystery Book 19)
Please refer to earlier discussion for further information... I have chosen to present this as a discussion also. It appears that whoever wrote this book description is inexperienced... While many write multi-genre books, it is rare indeed when you get a clean cozy described as a riveting mystery thriller... at least in my experience... Of course, I admit to my bias against the clean description being used as a basis for evaluating any book...
As soon as I saw the setting on the cover for this book, my immediate genre was identified as a gothic mystery... Once I started reading the conceptual plot was close enough, although very modernized, that I could not escape the emotional impact that the story presents to readers. A well-known Gothic, Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier soon was recalled, given that the setting is in France...in a very old but still used, perhaps haunted, but definitely with hidden escape locations, rooms that elicited fright and danger, including a cellar that, perhaps, had been haunted by the prisoners which were once housed there--during the times that it was not being used as a monastery...
It was on the bottom level of the abbey, just above the main floor, near a chapel called Notre-Dame-Sous-Terre. Maggie shivered again. Literally translated: Notre-Dame-Sous-Terre meant Our Lady of the Underworld. A caption underneath the icon on the map read: This is the oldest part of the monastery. From the first millennium. Maggie felt her scalp prickle. She jammed the map back in her jacket pocket and hurried around a tight corner to the first set of stairs that led downward. How much time did she have left? Were the three minutes up? Surely Soeur Thérèse would be waiting at the statue of the Black Madonna.
A place where you may discover in a hidden area of that building or come face to face with the Black Madonna... How will you view her being there, not as a part of the church itself, but perhaps hidden on purpose... or are you just hallucinating that she is there, where the map has led you...
That is, if you are the main character who is found throughout the book, sneaking through, searching for some way to save her husband from cruel accusations that he is a murderer... Was it an attempt to lighten up the reality of the setting and the events that was to happen to add some family connections in a Bed and Breakfast, which opens and closes the book, even including a recipe thrown in for effect, This was not an amateur detective in a cozy mystery. This was a woman fighting for her marriage. A marriage which she was so afraid of losing that it was she who proposed that she and her husband travel to what was to be a couples retreat...supposedly...
Majestic, magical, mysterious. Maggie stared up at the eighty towering meters of solid granite—topped by the famous abbey and its statue of Saint Michael. She felt her skin tingle at the sight. Mont St-Michel appeared like a floating mirage on the horizon, rising up in a heart-stopping manifestation of what the ancient monks had hoped to create—an abbey as close to heaven as possible. The base of the village loomed before them in a wall of broken rock that supported the lichen-covered eleventh-century Benedictine abbey. Maggie had done her homework on the island. But nothing had prepared her for the sheer enchantment of seeing it like this. Yes, she’d visited years ago. But she must have had blinders on at the time because she felt as if she were seeing it for the first time. “It’s magnificent,” Maggie said breathlessly. As far as hopeful beginnings went, just the sight of this breathtaking fortress was everything she could have dreamed of. Immediately she pushed away her doubts and thoughts of returning to the train station.
Halfway up the Grande Rue Maggie spotted a statue of Joan of Arc poised at the doorway to a small chapel with a plain wooden door. The plaque over the door read Église St-Pierre. The small stone chapel looked modest and diminutive compared with the drama of the abbey towering directly above it.
Maggie had been quietly dealing with almost complete silence for nearly a month, after her 20+ years of being married. Of course, as most women would, she feared he was having an affair, even though it had only been about recently that he had so changed... What else could it be?! While her husband was stoic, he had always been a solid husband and father who was dedicated to her family--a rather strange one, to be sure--still the two had adjusted their lives accordingly when faced with problems before. This time was different... Maggie had no choice. She had never kept silent before so she hoped that group counseling might help. Her husband had not disagreed, so she proceeded to schedule...
On an island, where a small group of villagers surrounded the long-standing building which had come to be a tourist attraction--which was now totally necessary since the present residents were no longer able to financially meet the needs for keeping the facility open...
There were a total of three couples and a counselor who had good references, perhaps, but quickly became questionable given his quick move to establish total control of what was to take place. Phones were gathered, no outside contact was to be permitted. The kitchen staff provided the evening meal and left for the night. Only three permanent residents were left and they did not participate in what was to come...
It had been a beautiful dinner setting, with two women serving them, along with bottles and bottles of wine for consumption... Everybody was beginning to relax, although that was hard for Maggie since her husband had stayed back in their room when she was ready to go and he'd motioned her to go on ahead... He came right as dinner was starting...
“Sometimes I try to imagine what marriage might be like with someone who actually spoke to me,” Maggie said. “I try to imagine how things would be different if I didn’t always have to interpret your grunts or decipher your silences.”
“What is happening?” Maggie said, reaching out for Laurent. But he was far away now. She saw him standing with his hands by his side, his arms long and touching the stone floor. The stone floor that Maggie suddenly realized was wet. She took a step back as she saw the hallway filling up with water. “Maggie, no,” Laurent said, his voice a long way away. “Stay calm.” “The place is flooding!” she shouted. “Don’t you see it?” “It’s not. It’s not there,” Laurent said, his voice a tiny dot a thousand miles away. Maggie was hearing his voice through her brain, through her memory. She looked around the hall and saw the walls begin to move like they were breathing. They inhaled and exhaled, sucking in and out in time with the screams of the prisoners captive in the walls. “Laurent, where are you?” Maggie screamed, looking wildly around for him. But he had gone too. The water was nearly to her knees now and it was clear it was meant to drown her—to drown them all. She turned and sloshed through the deluge, through the filthy water toward the stairwell. A man’s torso floated past, face down, but from the hair and shirt she could see it was Alex. Maggie shrieked and fell against the wall to avoid the corpse, then fell to one knee, sloshing in the water, tasting the salt foam as it splashed up into her face. She scrambled back to her feet and clutched her head to block out the screams of the abbey prisoners, squeezing her eyes shut tight as she did. She heard her name being called as if from a long way away. At first she thought it was Laurent but then it sounded like the prisoners had begun to chant her name. “Maggeeee! Maggeee!” She turned and ran, realizing the water had suddenly gone and there was now nothing impeding her. She felt an abounding joy suffuse her then and when she did, all the lights in the hall blinked on in a golden halo of grace and goodness. She felt encompassed by it. She still ran, with her mouth open in awe at the electrifying show around her, as stardust—literal stardust—sprinkled down from above coating her hair and shoulders. Then the music that had always been there in the background suddenly came to the foreground in an almost mystical crescendo of horns and percussion. Maggie slowed to stare in awe at the golden avenue the passageway had become. It looked as if it was lined in gold, glittering from every stone, every surface. As if goodness itself was imbedded in the walls. The walls pulsed around her in a shower of love and goodwill. She was still moving forward, still in wonderment, as her foot hit something solid and she stumbled. She reached out for the walls to break her fall but they moved away from her. She fell, slamming painfully onto the stone ground, her hands in front of her in an involuntary attempt to catch herself. She lay there feeling the cold of the floor emanating up into her legs, her hips and her hands. Her legs rested on something soft, the impasse that had tripped her. Maggie lay immobile, her body humming with expectation, and saw the last and final dusting of gold dust sprinkle slowly down onto her hands. She felt an incredible sadness come over her. Slowly, she turned to look at the thing she had fallen over. And started to scream.
~~~~~~
It soon becomes clear to readers that the couples were getting drunk. The resident priest had joined them for dinner and one of the wives had been seated next to him...Much to his dislike, she soon was cozying up to him! And during all of this, the counselor was talking, describing what and how the weekend would proceed... At some point, there was a call to have the couples join for the first activity... Individuals were becoming a problem... Soon the couples were no longer matched with their spouses... And the counselor did nothing to solve that strange beginning of a couples weekend... Maggie was very disturbed, when the woman who had been cozying up to the priest set her eyes on Maggie's husband!
Maggie was perhaps the only one who realized that she was experiencing what appeared to be hallucinations... And insofar as possible became alert to her own actions... She believed she had been drugged! The others too?! One thing was clear. Nobody knew what was going on with whom or why... Until a body was discovered in a location that was far away from the area where dinner had been served...
The victim's throat had been cut...
And the last person that she had been seen with...was Maggie's husband.
Who claimed that he had delivered her to her own husband... and pushed her into his arms... The husband had been so drunk the entire time that there was no way for him to agree to that claim...
With such a small number of people involved, I am purposely not including any names except Maggie's who knew she had been drugged and had no way of being able to prove where her husband was, even though she immediately claimed he was with her... Knowing that she, too, had seen her husband with the now dead woman as they had left the dining area...
But when she finally found him, it was clear that there was something wrong with him...he was sweating, woozy... She knew he'd been drugged again... And on her first hunt out into the huge building, she came upon the counselor making a tape (with a phone) of what he had decided to say to the police when they came...that he was blaming Maggie's husband as the last man seen with the dead woman!
And, worse, a major storm front had come and the entire island was soon under water, gaining strength as the rain kept coming down and the tide grew higher, soon coming into the halls in the lower areas... until Maggie, when the female nun had come to talk to her husband, explained that she knew who had killed the woman and wanted to meet him, it was Maggie who went instead, since her husband was now unconscious...
It was Maggie, too, again, who saw a door and heard the tide coming in... closer and closer... Maggie thought she heard a moan, even though she felt she was where she should be...and had seen the Black Madonna... still the nun was not around...
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