Customer Reviews

Good Friday Murder (Christine Bennett Mysteries)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you can read (or listen to the audiobook version) this story and not be in tears by the end, you are a stronger reader than I am. This was one of the most moving stories I've ever read. Ms. Harris is able, in the guise of telling the simple tale of a nun who left the convent and gets involved in a mystery simply through the process of living her everyday life, to create characters who are so sympathy-engendering as to make them part of your life. They become like family--and their deaths had me sobbing.
Add that to a well-crafted mystery story, and you have the beginning of a mystery series of books which one will want to read, and re-read in later years.
May Ms. Harris be able to keep on writing Christine Bennett
mystery stories!

This is the first Christine Bennett mystery I read....as soon as I closed the last page, I went to my local bookstore and bought the complete series!! Christine spent half her life in a convent, and upon deciding that she was not cut out to be a nun, moved to her recently deceased Aunt's home in New York state.... While at a local town meeting in her town of Oakwood, she volunteered to investigate a murder by mentally challenged savard twins who were convicted of murdering their mother 50 years ago on Good Friday....the town members were afraid to allow Greenwillow Institution permission to relocate in Oakwood. Christine visited her own mentally challenged cousin, Gene, many times and got to know the savard twins. With the help of Jack Brooks, a local policeman, Christine solves this first of many mysteries.....at the same time they are realizing they each have feelings for the other....(this is only the beginning of a great relationship.......) This mystery, as well as those that follow, is a great read with original plot and superb character development....so many series seem to fizzle out after a few reads, but this one only gets better and better!! Any mystery that keeps me guessing right up to the end is a "5" in my book!!

Christine Bennett is in the process of readjusting to "normal life" after spending 15 years as a cloistered nun. At a town meeting, she speaks in defense of disabled twin brothers accused of killing their mother 40 years before and to her surprise is put in charge of researching the case. As she starts to dig into the past, she meets a helpful (and smitten) police officer who helps in her search for the truth.

Christina does not run around accusing people of the murder without evidence, judge suspects harshly for their past actions or deliberately place herself in danger which is a refreshing change. This is a refreshing cozy mystery with likeable characters and an engrossing mystery.

After being released from her vows, ex-nun Christine Bennett volunteers to investigate a forty-year-old murder case long since closed. Christine has to bring the past into the present in an effort to exonerate a pair of retarded savant twins, now senior citizens, while she is also adjusting to her new life as a contemporary woman. Lee Harris has made the characters in this book come to life! This was the first but definitely will not be my last time reading a Lee Harris mystery!!!

what can i say? this is one of my favorite books, in large part because i feel that the characters are so real that i feel that i know them - a confession: as an "ex-nun" myself, i was delighted to find one in a book that was believable - i, like chris, just knew it was time to go back to secular life - i wasn't mad at anyone, i wasn't in love with anyone, and to this day i have my "sister josephs" in my life, although i have been gone from the convent for twenty three years and happily married for twenty two of these years - also, like chris, i met the man i married very shortly after leaving, and i tried to keep things casual until i had been out awhile, but... a friend at work gave me this book thinking i'd love it and i did...and immediately went out and acquired all the others then written, and can't wait for new ones -all of the "chris" books are just plain old good reads!

I have had this book on my list of To Be Read forever. I put it there only because this title kept coming up on book review sites, favorite lists, etc. everywhere I looked. When a book comes up that often I usually give it a try and it usually turns out to have been everywhere I looked for a reason. (This is why I finally read Val McDermid's A Place of Execution and it was fantastic also.) Well my theory stands! This was terrific little novel and I highly recommend it, I read it in one day because it was so good.

The first book in the Christine Bennett mystery series is a great start. It keeps you interested all through the book. You think it would be a difficult murder to solve because it is so old but Christine does a good job. You will want to keep reading the series after this first book. She has great character development.

This was the first Christine Bennett mystery I read. It was so good I recomended it to my family. I was in my fifties then but the book was rated as superb by my daughters in their twenties and by my husband. From then on I've read all Ms Harris' books. She's fabulous. Maybe you could say they're cozies but I don't think so. She has a deep sense of plot and characterization. Kix is a real person, the men and women involved in her investigations are psychologically correct. To make things short, I love Ms Harris books. They are not only good mysteries for the dentist's waiting room: they are very good novels.

The detective character in this series (and this is the first of many) is a former nun, Christine Bennett. She has recently left a convent that she entered while still in her mid-teens (she was an orphan and this seemed the best place for her to be). She has inherited a house from an aunt and has enough money so that she's free to accept a low-paying teaching position (she appears to have only one course!) that will likely leave her with spare time to solve murder mysteries.

Chris is likeable, as are most of the characters in this book. She takes on the task of trying to find out if a developmentally challenged man who spent 40 years in a psychiatric facility for murdering his mother really did it. At stake is whether the community she lives in will OK a home that her developmentally challenged cousin lives in to move to an old house in her town. The man is one of twins who had special gifts - savants -- including the ability to recite word for word everything they hear. Oddly enough, they refuse to speak to the police about what happened to their mother -- who is found dead in the apartment with them. Chris goes at this with an open mind, but the more she investigates, the more she sees that there are others with motive and opportunity for this murder. In the course of investigating, she meets a detective, Jack, with whom there is mutual attraction.

If you like cozy procedurals (Chris does much what a police detective would do), I highly recommend this book. Don't be put off by the former-nun character -- this is not a book that preaches at you.

I decided to listen to the tape before reading the book. My wife and I were going on a long trip by car overseas where English language radio was not available. We had read other books by Lee Harris, a favorite of ours, but had not read this, her first mystery story. This tape turned out to be a unique experience and filled our afternoon of driving with a tale of intrigue and humor as well, and then got us to thinking about how in unusual people, the mind can capture events in a way that's least expected. Judith Roberts Seto, gave a great reading and moved the story along at a rapid and engaging pace. I think from now on we will try tapes like this from authors we have enjoyed in print in the past.