I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died
An Emily Dickinson Mystery • Book 2
by Amanda Flower
Why You'll Love This
Ralph Waldo Emerson walks into the Dickinsons' home — and someone ends up dead before he walks out.
- Great if you want: cozy historical mystery with a sharp, literary-minded sleuth
- The experience: light and brisk — period atmosphere without heavy historical density
- The writing: Flower weaves Dickinson's poetic voice into the mystery's bones naturally
- Skip if: you want psychological depth over charming, plot-driven whodunit
About This Book
When Ralph Waldo Emerson comes to Amherst in the summer of 1856, Emily Dickinson sees her chance to meet the literary idol she has admired from afar — perhaps even to share her work with him. But what begins as an exhilarating encounter with greatness turns sharply darker when murder arrives alongside the celebrated guest. Amanda Flower places her quietly unconventional Emily at the center of a mystery that asks who among the respectable and the brilliant might be capable of terrible things, and the stakes feel genuinely personal: reputation, ambition, and the fragile courage it takes to be seen.
What makes this book particularly rewarding is how Flower uses the dual perspective of Emily and her housemaid Willa to illuminate the rigid social distances of mid-nineteenth-century New England without ever turning the history into a lecture. The period detail is worn lightly, the dialogue has spark, and Emily herself is rendered with enough idiosyncrasy to feel true to the poet's documented strangeness. The mystery plot is briskly constructed, but it's the texture of daily life inside the Dickinson household — its ambitions, its tensions, its silences — that lingers.
