Madame Bovary’s Haberdashery
March 2013
Maurilia Meehan / Transit Lounge
Award-winning novelist Maurilia Meehan deftly pays homage to Agatha Christie and Gustave Flaubert, while creating her own delightful tale sure to satisfy lovers of noir, passion, and a great mystery. When the reclusive knitter and erotic novelist Celia leaves the room, she leaves behind her “a trail of unraveling wool”. What she doesn’t anticipate is becoming part of a brief ménage à trois with best friend Odette, and their new housemate Zac (an amateur translator of Flaubert), a liaison that suddenly becomes far more complicated. When Odette disappears from her new apartment, Celia, an Agatha Christie devotee, finds herself playing her previously imagined role of detective, charged with unraveling a murder mystery as entwined and colourful as her “increasingly bizarre crochet work”.
Following a trail of tarot cards variously connected to Odette’s multifarious love interests, Celia not only questions her own objectivity in pursuing the case; she encounters the delightful Miss Ball (a character fictionalised in her own novel as Flaubert’s Emma Bovary) and her haberdashery. Meehan delightfully subverts the ending of Flaubert’s classic tale, and elegantly integrates it into the developing mystery. Unable to confine her enquiry to five suspects, Celia must draw upon Miss Marple’s skill in abstract logic, the answer revealing itself when she knits together the much-needed resolution.
Madame Bovary’s Haberdashery is published in April.
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