Murder Takes a Vacation by Laura Lippman
A lighthearted romp that is like a breath of springtime.
In bestselling author Laura Lippman’s Murder Takes a Vacation, Muriel Blossom, a long-widowed woman in her late 60s, has lived her life for others — her deceased husband Horace, her daughter and her grandchildren.
After dedicating 10 years to helping raise her daughter’s family in Arizona, they have moved to Japan without her, sparking her return home to Baltimore. There’s a wrinkle, though. Muriel finds a lottery ticket floating across a parking lot, and lo and behold, she becomes an instant millionaire.
A Cozy European Mystery
Previously a person of modest means, Muriel decides to treat herself and her best friend, Elinor, to an extravagant barge cruise down the Seine. However, things go awry from the moment she boards the London-bound flight in Baltimore.
She plans to explore London on her own before joining Elinor in Paris, but she meets Allan Turner, a silver-haired man of her age. He notices she is traveling alone and offers to get her settled on the plane and coordinate her Heathrow connection to Paris. Mrs. Blossom, which is how she views herself, is immediately attracted to him, and he to her. Or so it seems.
She and Allan spend a memorable day exploring London, and they plan to meet again in Baltimore upon her return. They even select the restaurant. Allan arranges for Mrs. Blossom’s passage on the train to Paris rather than flying, and despite her claustrophobia, she boards the train. All the while, she believes someone is watching her.
Love Interests and Stolen Artifacts
In Paris, she is accosted by a debonair young man named Danny, who introduces himself as a fashion stylist and who was the person surveilling her on the train.
Flashy Danny takes Mrs. Blossom under his sartorial wing and squires her around for a day of Parisian sightseeing and shopping. Upon returning to her hotel with Danny, they learn that, unknown to Mrs. Blossom, Allan had also arrived in Paris. But he has tragically taken a fatal fall from his hotel balcony.
Mrs. Blossom is shocked by these turns of events and sees her second chance at romance plunging over the balcony’s ledge with Allan. But the danger doesn’t end there. Danny mysteriously keeps popping up around every corner where trouble lurks, even on her cruise.
What ensues is a madcap chase across France for a stolen Pakistani jewel-encrusted artifact with Mrs. Blossom at the center of it all. Does Mrs. Blossom know more than she’s letting on about Allan’s death and the missing artifact? And is she being shadowed, and if so, who’s after her? And who can she trust?
A Protagonist You’ll Love
Murder Takes a Vacation is a lighthearted romp that is like a breath of springtime. Mrs. Blossom, in fact, blossoms throughout the story as she discovers there is more to life than being someone’s mother or grandmother or widow.
The observational talents she’d honed working at a detective agency make her an astute amateur sleuth determined to clear Allan’s name and help locate the stolen birdlike sculpture reminiscent of the Maltese Falcon. But her sheltered life and her naivete make her an easy mark, as she is someone easily deceived by appearances.
Mrs. Blossom is like M.C. Beaton’s Agatha Raisin without the ego or the crankiness. She is even-tempered and a woman of a certain age who is used to being an invisible observer rather than a participant. However, nothing makes her assume a leading role in the hunt quicker than dodging bullets, knives, and villains on foreign soil.
A Terrific Summer Read
Murder Takes a Vacation is a delightful non-cozy, cozy mystery. Laura Lippman is known for her gritty tales of Baltimore’s underbelly, and it is thrilling to read an upbeat novel by this talented author.
Lippman has developed Mrs. Blossom, a character who has guest-starred in previous works, into a charming persona with whom you want to become friends. The reader wants to travel with her on the barge, drink wine with her at the sidewalk cafes and shop with her on the winding side streets of France. Ms. Blossom is the perfect travel companion until the bullets fly. Then duck!
Murder Takes a Vacation hits the target for a terrific summer read, and readers don’t need a passport for this glorious and amusing European trip.
A Chat with Author Laura Lippman
The protagonist in Murder Takes a Vacation is a 60-something-year-old widow named Muriel Blossom. Can you tell us a bit about Mrs. Blossom?
She’s appeared in other Tess Monaghan books, and in a novella called The Girl in the Green Raincoat. I’ve always been very fond of her, and I felt like I underwrote her, and I didn’t take advantage of her layers.
She knows how to play both sides of the street, basically. There’s a scene in the book where she literally makes herself less recognizable when she realizes she’s being followed. It’s like, take off the scarf. Put on the sunglasses, and it is a book that’s very much about being a 60-something woman who happens to be the focus of a lot of people’s attention because they think she has a stolen antiquity.
I think, starting the book, I just assumed that Mrs. Blossom was going to end up in a romance by the end of the book. The book is very much inspired by the movie Charade.
Speaking of Charade, your chameleon-like “Cary Grant” character, Danny, befriends Mrs. Blossom, much to her chagrin. He’s always there when trouble occurs. What does he teach her?
You get to the end of the book, and you don’t know his sexual orientation, which Mrs. Blossom realizes is none of her business. And that’s a little bit of a growth moment for her to stop thinking in such stark ways about people’s identity. It’s like Mrs. Blossom is an evolved character. She wants to do right by people. She wants to use the right pronouns. She wants to be always polite and considerate.
And Danny is her entry point into learning that other people don’t owe you all the information about their identity. That it isn’t really any of your business, unless someone makes it your business about what their sexual proclivities are. She’s learning, and that’s part of what’s going on through the book. She’s broadening her horizons. She’s opening herself up to the world by traveling. She’s opening up her own world, her own interests.
Are there any similarities between Muriel and you, or family members?
At this point, Muriel and I are only 2 years apart in age. I didn’t consciously think of it as an autobiographical book, and it’s not. We’re so different, Mrs. Blossom and I. But we were going through something similar, which is, I saw my marriage end.
It feels kind of tacky to say it, but my divorce settlement was kind of a lottery. I mean, I was married to someone for 20 years who worked in the television industry, and we put aside a lot of money because we lived relatively simply, and that money was divided between us. And I asked myself, like Mrs. Blossom did — who am I now? I’m a single woman in her 60s.
And I was thinking a lot about my sister. My sister is Mrs. Blossom’s age. Well, actually, my sister just turned 69, but I guess Mrs. Blossom will turn 69 this year, too. My sister is someone who, like Muriel Blossom, was shy. Not particularly worldly. She married in her 20s and hardly ever traveled. But she had avant-garde taste in music, and she is smart.
I understand that your Tess Monaghan books have been optioned. Can you tell me about the Tomorrow Studios deal?
The Tess books were optioned twice before, but went nowhere. This time around, I know more about writing for Hollywood than the average novelist because of my ex-husband. I’m just very familiar with that world. He created The Wire, and he had many shows on TV. I know what it takes to make a TV show, and it’s really hard. I’ve had other books optioned, obviously The Lady in the Lake, and Every Secret Thing was optioned by Frances McDormand.
Last summer, I was out in Hollywood for the wedding of my oldest friend’s kid, and I stopped in to have lunch with Sylvie and Hillary, my agents. We were talking about how Tess was suddenly in the moment. Everyone wants these strong female protagonists, like, finally, 25 years in.
The Tomorrow Studios contract was finalized a couple of weeks ago, and they’re just the best. Luckily, I’ll be co-writing the pilot with Megan Abbott.
Laura Lippman was a reporter for 20 years, including twelve years at The (Baltimore) Sun. She began writing novels while working full-time and published seven books about “accidental PI” Tess Monaghan before leaving daily journalism in 2025. Her work has been awarded the Edgar ®, the Anthony, the Agatha, the Shamus, the Nero Wolfe, Gumshoe and Barry awards. She has also been nominated for other prizes in the crime fiction field, including the Hammett and the Macavity. She was the first-ever recipient of the Mayor’s Prize for Literary Excellence and the first genre writer recognized as Author of the Year by the Maryland Library Association.
Ms. Lippman grew up in Baltimore and attended city schools through ninth grade. After graduating from Wilde Lake High School in Columbia, MD, Ms. Lippman attended Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Her other newspaper jobs included the Waco Tribune-Herald and the San Antonio Light.
Ms. Lippman returned to Baltimore in 1989 and has lived there since. She is the daughter of Theo Lippman Jr., a Sun editorial writer who retired in 1995 but continues to freelance for several newspapers, and Madeline Mabry Lippman, a former Baltimore City school librarian. Her sister, Susan, is a local bookseller.
Publish Date: 6/17/2025
Genre: Fiction, Mystery
Author: Laura Lippman
Page Count: 272 pages
Publisher: William Morrow
ISBN: 9780062998101