Helen Thorpe

Meet Helen Thorpe. She’s smart, preternaturally calm, deeply insightful and a freshly trained butler. On the day she is supposed to start her career as an unusually equanimous domestic professional serving one of the wealthiest families in the world, she is called back to a spiritual retreat where she used to work, the Yatra Institute, on one of British Columbia’s gulf islands. The owner of the lodge, Helen’s former employer Edna, has died while on a three-month silent self-retreat, leaving Helen instructions to settle her affairs. But Edna’s will is more detailed than most, and getting things in order means Helen must run the retreat for a select group to determine which of Edna’s relatives will inherit the institute. Helen’s classmates, newly minted butlers themselves, decide they can’t let her go it alone and arrive to help Helen pull things off. After all, is there anything three butlers can’t handle? As Helen carries out the will’s instructions, she begins to think that someone had reason to want Edna dead. A reluctantly suspicious investigator, Helen and her band of butlers find themselves caught up in the mystery.

Butler-detective Helen Thorpe returns to help a wannabe influencer get her life in order, and solve the murders of her fellow content creators, in this hilarious sequel to “Mindful of Murder” by bestselling author Susan Juby. When Buddhist butler Helen Thorpe is loaned out to help Cartier Hightower get her life in order, Helen finds herself working for a young woman entirely unbound by the fetters of good taste or sound judgment. One of Cartier's fellow content creators has recently died in a strange accident. Soon after Helen arrives, another is killed in an equally bizarre way. Cartier begins to drag Helen around on the influencer circuit, where neither of them is particularly welcome. Then comes the terrible incident at the EDM nightclub that turns Cartier into a global pariah, at least according to social media. Helen hopes a period of simplicity and reflection and an internet detox will help Cartier find her true nature and maybe acquire some social graces. But Helen's job gets much harder when Cartier's friends show up at the lavish ranch where Cartier and Helen have retreated. Soon, Helen finds herself trying to avoid becoming Instafamous while bringing some peace to a girl who very much needs it. This task turns out to be even more impossible when it becomes clear that they have been followed to Weeping Creek Ranch by a murderer.