The Mysterious Death of Junetta Plum (A Harriet Stone Mystery) by Valerie Wilson Wesley Narrator: Diana Blue
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Harlem Renaissance, historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Harriet Stone Mystery #1
Pages: 224
Length: 6 hours and 42 minutes
Published by Dreamscape Media, Kensington Books on December 16, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
At the darkly glamorous height of the Roaring 20s, an independent Black intellectual and her bi-racial foster child are immersed in the vibrant world of the Harlem Renaissance – and a shocking murder on Striver’s Row – in this thrilling Jazz Age mystery for reader of Nekesia Afia, Jacqueline Winspear, Avery Cunningham’s The Mayor of Maxwell Street.
1926: Harriet Stone, a liberated, educated Black woman, and Lovey, the orphaned, biracial 12-year-old she is bound to protect, are Harlem-bound, embarking on a new, hopefully less traumatic chapter in their lives. They have been invited to move from Connecticut by Harriet’s cousin, Junetta Plum, who runs a boardinghouse for independent-minded single women.
It’s a bold move, since Harriet has never met Junetta, but the fatalities of the Spanish flu and other tragedies have already forced her and Lovey to face their worst fears. Alone but for each other, they have little left to lose—or so it seems as they arrive at sophisticated Junetta’s impressive brownstone.
Her cousin has a sharp edge, which makes Harriett slightly uncomfortable. Still, after retiring to her room for the night, she finally falls asleep—only to awaken to Junetta arguing with someone downstairs. In the morning, she makes a shocking discovery at the foot of the stairs.
What ensues will lead Harriet to question Junetta’s very identity—and to wonder if she and Lovey are in danger, as well. It will also tie Harriet to five strangers. Among them, Harriet is sure someone knows something. What she doesn’t yet know is that one will play a crucial role in helping her investigate her cousin’s murder . . . that she will be tied to the others in ways she could never imagine . . . and that her life will take off in a startling new direction. . . .
My Review:
It’s the mystery of Junetta Plum’s whole, entire life that confuses, empowers, inspires and enables the life that her cousin Harriet Stone drops into in the opening pages of this book. Not that Harriet doesn’t find herself poking into Junetta’s death – because it is mysterious – but it’s Harriet’s amateur, informal, two-steps-forward-one-step-back investigation into her cousin’s whole entire life that pushes this story forward – and very nearly drops it, and Harriet, in their tracks.
Harriet Stone arrives in Jazz Age Harlem at the end of her emotional tether. Literally, as her once close family in Hartford Connecticut is gone, dead of illness or accident or misadventure or the ravages of the Spanish Flu epidemic. In her mid-20s, unmarried and still grieving her dead fiancé, responsible for her young, mixed-race, adopted sister Lovey, Harriet sees the invitation from her cousin Junetta to come to Harlem and live with her as a lifeline. It’s a chance to make a clean break and a fresh start. An opportunity to live the life that she’s read about in publications like The Crisis and The New Negro.
So she takes a gamble and travels with Lovey to New York City, reaching out to take the hand of a family member she never knew she had but hopes to get to know.
She’ll never get that chance. The morning after Harriet and Lovey’s late arrival, Junetta is dead on the floor of her Harlem mansion, a knife through her heart. The police, unwilling to bother investigating the death of a black woman – even a wealthy one – declare Junetta’s death a suicide in spite of just how unlikely that is.
Harriet is left with Junetta’s entire estate along with a whole lot of questions and not many answers. Everyone around her is keeping secrets – and some of those secrets are Junetta’s. Some are illegal, some are immoral, and some are just the cost of getting by as a black woman in a white man’s world.
The question that Harriet has to resolve before she can move on with her life in a dead woman’s house is the riddle of which of those secrets – and whose – got Junetta Plum killed. And whether that secret has the tenacity to reach out from the grave to harm Harriet, Lovey, or any of the people that Harriet has just begun to call dear.
Escape Rating A+: This is probably the most ‘mixed feelings’ A+ I’ve ever given a book. The A+ is because I absolutely loved this story. I got caught up in the audio from the very beginning and was just riveted. At the same time, I was enjoying the narrator so much that I didn’t want to rush through her reading. Diana Blue came to represent Harriet for me to the point that I heard her voice even when I read for myself.
But the story didn’t feel like a mystery. There’s a mystery in it, but that mystery felt like it was considerably more about Junetta’s life than her death and most of the time it didn’t seem as if Harriet’s investigation was driving the plot. What drove the plot for me was the slice of Harriet’s life, her introduction to the city, the way she slowly made her own way, the friends she made and the people who made her common sense and ‘mother wit’ raise the hair on the back of her neck.
I felt like I was reading about Harriet’s life, and that her investigation into Junetta’s life and death was just a part of Harriet’s story. As I was listening/reading, the story felt considerably more like historical fiction than it did mystery.
And what it felt was REAL. An in-depth portrait of a time and place as seen through the eyes of someone living it. The different women’s perspectives from different generations, made the narrative and the time period shine.
From a personal perspective, I think I got so immersed in this story because it’s told from Harriet’s first person perspective and everything about the story focuses on the women who are “trying to make a way in this hard old world,” as Junetta herself put it. The story is focused on women’s lives, women’s friendships – and enemy-ships – women’s problems and women picking up the pieces. The way that the story dove deeply into Harriet’s life, the difficulties that she and the women around her live with because they are black and because they are female, made it easy for this reader to walk a mile or two of Harlem in the 1920s with them in spite of our differences in time, place, race and circumstances.
If this had been written from the perspective of one of the male characters, I think it would have been entirely different, and likely more focused on the mystery. It would still have been a good story, but not this absorbing. OTOH, it would likely have been a more straightforward mystery from Detective Elliott Hoyt’s point of view.
I DO think later books in the series will clearly be mysteries, but this one reads more like series setup, character intro, and slice of historical life. I LOVED it, and the audio is terrific, but Harriet’s investigation of her cousin’s death just didn’t feel like it was driving the story in the way it would if this followed the strict rules that make a mystery a mystery. In its own way, learning about who her cousin was and what really happened to her drives Harriet, but it doesn’t drive the story.
So while this did remind me of Nekesa Afia’s Dead, Dead Girls, it also reminded me of Leslye Penelope’s The Monsters We Defy. Those stories are also set in the Harlem Renaissance, both are centered around the black community in Harlem in the 1920s, and both have a mystery element but they also both have a paranormal, fantasy, magical realism element. Harriet’s story does not slip into any magical or fantasy realms, but like both of those readalikes it does seem to be focused more on the history than the mystery.
Your reading mileage may vary on the question of historical fiction vs. historical mystery, but I hope you’ll give this book a try because it was excellent either way. Which means that I’m definitely looking forward to Harriet’s next investigation. I hope it comes soon!
