Mindful of Murder

 by Susan Juby

This book is by a BC Author who wrote Alice I think, Miss Smithers and more.

The book is about a young woman, formally a Buddhist Monk who left the Monastery to help a friend run a spiritual retreat on an island on the BC Coast.  After she had been there for a while her friend/Mentor paid for her to attend an expensive course for Professional Butlers.  The young woman has just graduated when she learns that her Mentor has died.  Apparently she took her own life as part of a planned death.  The young woman has to return to the retreat to carry out some of the wishes of her Mentor.  Two of her classmates from the Butler school come to help her out.

The young woman is suspicious about the apparent suicide.  She feels her Mentor would have told the members of her death group and her death doula about her plans.  She did not do this.

As part of carrying out the wishes of her Mentor the woman has to invite the woman's nieces and nephews to the retreat where they will partipate in a flower arranging class, a dance/movement class and a meditation class.  After a couple weeks the young woman is supposed to decide which of the four young people should take over the task of running the retreat.  Three of the four candidates are spoiled rich kids who seem to have fallen on hard times, the fourth is a relative unknown to all of them, a bit of a hippy chick.

There is lots of grumbling by the participants and squabbling.  Strange things start happening, one of the people insists someone threw stones at them, another person had their flower arrangement destroyed.  A young man, associated with one of the girls is found murdered and then a huge storm causes damage to the building and one of the Butlers is drugged.

Eventually they find out that one of the girls killed the aunt and her "boyfriend".  The two boys, brothers, cooked up a plot to create a journal in the Aunt's forged signature indicating she wanted them to have everything.

The butler decides to entrust the retreat to the hippy chick, the only one she thinks she can trust.

It was an interesting, sometimes comical read.