Julie Klassen. The Bridge to Belle Island. Bethany House, 2019.
This book was recommended to me by someone who knows I like an entertaining mystery. However, I was reluctant at first to read it because the cover makes it look like historical chick lit. The cover has a woman in a Regency outfit with a sizeable mansion in the background. Yeah, the cover looked like Jane Austen or the Brontës, but the Bridge to Belle Island really was more like Agatha Christie. The romance comes quickly at the end like a Shakespeare play.
The murder happens almost immediately. There are clues and red herrings. Much of the action takes place on Belle Island, a small island in the Thames River. The attorney Benjamin Booker is sent there by his law firm to do a few things—investigate the murder and determine who gets trusteeship of the family inheritance.
You see, it is a senior partner of Booker’s firm who has been murdered. Not only that, but he was assigned to be trustee of the family estate of Belle Island because the two heirs were both minor females at the time of their father and uncle’s demise. Now Isabelle lives on the estate, running it well as a family business. Her niece Rose is getting married. Even though this is only about 1815, there is no legal reason why they cannot manage their inheritance themselves now.
Isabelle Wilder is in danger of becoming a spinster. She is thirty, and because of a fear of a family curse, she has not left the island for any reason in ten years. She is also a prime suspect in the murder of her “uncle” who was the trustee and is the murder victim. She says she had a dream of his murder the night it happened. Of course, she was on the island while the victim was killed miles away in London. But how could she have known the details? Maybe there is some spooky supernatural thing going on. So, yes, there is a touch of the Gothic.
We discover, as is often the case in such stories of murders, that nobody really liked Uncle Percival. There are a whole cast of characters who had reasons to see him out of the way: the two heiresses, Rose’s fiancé, the doctor suitor whom Percival turned away, another suitor whom Percival got to join the army in time to fight Napoleon, several of the employees of his law firm who did not like working for him, and then some criminals who think he had double-crossed them. We discover that even Isabelle’s maid had had some unfortunate dealing with the man. To make things more complicated, one of the employees who is a suspect dies in the same manner Percival did.
The novel provides many curious details. We learn a lot about the medicine and pharmaceuticals of the period from the local physician Dr. Grant and from Mr. Booker’s father, who is a pharmacist. Having witnessed a few floods in my lifetime and having worked for the Coast Guard, I can assure any reader that the descriptions of flooding—adding some natural hazards to the story along with the deadly humanity—are spot on.
It is no spoiler to say that the ending reminded this reader of a Shakespeare comedy. Not the mystery of the killer—the revelation will be a surprise to most readers, I suspect, though the evidence is there. The end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has three couples getting married; the end of As You Like It has four.
The only difference is that because his were plays, Shakespeare has his couples get married together on stage. Since The Bridge to Belle Island is a novel, the author does not have to stage the drama that way, but there are three couples getting married at the end. Novels may have several subplots, after all. So, yes, there is the romance element in the tale, but the mystery and the action keep the story going. And, yes, it was not chick lit. The main character is Mr. Booker and his challenge is to solve the murder and figure out the complicated legal tangle of the Wilder estate. Well done.