William Shakespeare is credited with coining the term “salad days.” In Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra dismisses her earlier love of Julius Caesar as being in “My salad days, When I was green in judgment, cold in blood.”
In many mysteries, even before someone is murdered, the protagonists are already doing something that’s emotionally risky. Some have moved to a new location, returned to an old, problematic one, or are afraid that they might fail at a new enterprise.
And then someone is killed, and these already stressed characters need to take on additional risks in order to save themselves or someone close to them.
In this crop of recent mysteries, some of the main characters or the people they care about are in their youthful salad days while others are new to the sort of risks they take. Their emotional vulnerabilities give them extra challenges.
Take Sour Crime Donuts, for instance. Emily Fyne doesn’t immediately recognize the young woman who comes into Deputy Donut, the shop Emily co-owns, but then she remembers the bubbly little girl she looked after for a day when Emily was a teen.
Izzy is still spunky and enthusiastic. Barely out of college, the young woman plans to build greenhouses and grow produce year-round in northern Wisconsin. Emily still feels protective of the young woman, who truly is in her salad days, and agrees to meet her at the property Izzy plans to buy. There, Emily learns that Izzy faces more obstacles than cold winters.
Undaunted by the fact that Izzy has signed a contract to buy the property, a would-be developer is exploring the property and threatening to prevent Izzy from ever owning it. The next time Emily sees Izzy on that property, the usually spunky would-be entrepreneur is near the developer’s body.
Remembering Izzy as a little girl and then getting to know her as a young woman, Emily is certain that Izzy cannot have harmed the developer. But because Izzy is vulnerable due to her youth, enthusiasm, and inexperience, the ever-protective Emily is extra vulnerable, too.
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Amanda Flower, Caturday Crime
Kinley Remington is young and inexperienced. She doesn’t want to continue working for a horrible boss at a bank, but she’s afraid of trying to find a new job. And then, after she inadvertently locks an elderly heiress inside the bank’s vault and the woman’s valuable necklace goes missing, Kinley’s days of working at the bank end suddenly.
Kinley braves a visit the heiress to apologize, and the heiress confesses that she herself has the necklace. She promises to contact the authorities and explain, but before she can, she is murdered.
Kinley was the last person to see her alive.
Will the timid young woman find the confidence to uncover a killer and prove her own innocence while taking on a new and challenging responsibility—looking after the late heiress’s cat rescue mission?
Lynn Cahoon, An Amateur Sleuth’s Guide to Murder
Meg Gates has to reinvent her world when the company she worked for failed and the man she was planning to marry took one of her attendants instead of Meg on the honeymoon. Meg goes home to Bainbridge Island and moves into an apartment above her aunt and uncle’s garage.
Meg’s mother lets her work part time job in the family bookstore, and her aunt finds her a job helping a mystery author with research. Excited about what she’s learning Meg starts writing a guidebook to solving mysteries. She never expected that she, along with her sleuthing-club friends from middle school, would need to follow her own advice and tips.
However, the mystery author’s agent is murdered, and the author and one of Meg’s sleuthing-club friends are suspects. Complicating matters further, Meg’s uncle is the chief of police, which might be more helpful to Meg’s sleuthing if he weren’t trying to protect her from harm.
Can the emotionally vulnerable Meg juggle all of this plus the reappearance of the man about whom she was “green in judgment?”
Uzma Jalaluddin, Detective Aunty
Recently widowed Kausar Khan is long past her salad days when she is flung into a new, painful, and terrifying situation. A heart-wrenching call from her daughter Sana forces Kausar to do something she never expected, planned, or wanted to do—return to Toronto, the site of Kausar’s previous trauma and grief.
Sana has been arrested for murder and needs Kausar to look after Sana’s daughters. Kausar is originally from India where adults, regardless of relationship, are often called “aunty” or “uncle.” Living in Canada, the unusually observant Kausar has earned the affectionate nickname of “Detective Aunty.” Naturally, Detective Aunty will want to do more than look after her granddaughters.
Can she protect them and her own emotional equilibrium while she—with the girls’ help—attempts to discover who the actual murderer is and save Sana?
Ovidia Yu, The Rose Apple Tree Mystery
In this ninth mystery in the series, Singaporean Su Lin has also passed her salad days. She is an accomplished amateur sleuth, but she’s new to marriage. It’s the late 1940s. After a lightning-quick engagement, Su Lin and her reinstated police inspector bridegroom Thomas Le Froy leave for Singapore’s Cameron Highlands. It’s not quite a honeymoon.
Le Froy has been assigned to protect a threatened businessman and the businessman’s wife after other plantation owners were murdered. The wife disappears, and the businessman is murdered. Su Lin and Le Froy have to work together to solve murders and save themselves.
Due to a childhood bout with polio, Su Lin has a limp. Le Froy is missing a foot thanks to time spent in a Japanese internment camp. Their physical limitations barely faze them, however. It’s their fear of losing each other that makes them extra vulnerable.
E. J. Copperman, Switcheroo
Siblings Fran and Ken Stein run a private investigative agency. Having been mostly abandoned by their own parents, the brother and sister are driven to help others locate their birth parents. Austin Cobb asks Fran to help him find his, and she’s ready to accept the job with the usual caveat—Are you sure?
Finally, Austin admits that he wants to find out if his parents gave him up when he was two years old because he’s on the autism spectrum. Although fearing that the extra vulnerable young man might be hurt, Fran takes the case. Fran and Ken are not exactly ordinary, and not only because of being unusually tall and strong. Their father chose their names, Fran and Ken Stein, as a sort of meaningful joke.
While Fran attempts to find Austin’s birth parents, someone else comes into their lives and threatens to disrupt everything. Fran and Ken are physically and emotionally vulnerable, but it’s Austin who could be devastated, something that Fran needs to prevent.
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