Solving Mysteries with Daphne Du Maurier

I don’t know about you but when I was a teenager I loved reading books by Daphne Du Maurier. Her books always had a bit of romance, a sense of intrigue and her heroine’s were someone I could relate to. So when I saw that mystery writer Joanna Challis had written a mystery with Daphne Du Maurier as the main character, I just knew I had to check this one out.

The book is called “Peril at Somner House” and even the name has the ring of the old Daphne Du Maurier books. What I hadn’t known until I read the book is that Du Maurier had a bit of a rep when she was writing as someone who had a knack for getting herself into a situation right up to her elbows. In the book she is with her sister Angela, also a writer, and we meet them as they are heading out to an island in the Cornwall area that was a setting for all the DuMaurier books. Angela has been invited to visit with Lord and Lady Trevelyn, who are friends of hers. The island enchants Daphne, who is here a young woman just beginning her writing career and very obviously enamored of the romantic remoteness of the island.

All of that changes when their host is discovered dead, murdered, the next day and his wife is found to have taken up a lover that makes her a suspect in the murder. But the story is complicated when unexpected house guests in the form of a Major Browning and a fellow visitor to the house, Sir Marcus, stir the pot of romance for Daphne.

With Peril at Somner House the plot just gets thicker! Soon she is embroiled in the mystery of finding out just who could have killed their host, and why. There are almost too many possibilities! But the one possibility no one thought of turns out to be the answer that only Daphne is capable of discovering. That is if she can survive the discovery.