Review: MURDER AT LOST DOG LAKE, Vicki Delany

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 294 KB
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Publisher: Carrick Publishing (March 4, 2011)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• Source: I bought it

Product Description (Amazon)
2004 EPPIE finalist for best mystery.

Leanne Aimes, ex-cop, bitter single mother, private investigator, really needs a vacation. And the wilderness of Algonquin Park seems like just the place where she can relax and forget her troubles. A guided canoe trip is exactly what she needs. But it isn’t long before her companions beginning fighting amongst themselves. When a storm of unprecedented ferocity descends, the group is trapped on a remote island in the center of Lost Dog Lake. And Leanne comes to realize that someone in their small group is a murderer.

My take:
While MURDER AT LOST DOG LAKE is very readable it is not as good as Vicki Delany's latest books. (see my reviews below).
However, as Vicki herself says, it was a previously unpublished title, written earlier in her writing career, which she has now made available as a Kindle e-book at $2.99.

The scenario is basically a locked room mystery as the weather closes in on a group of canoeists in a backwoods areas of Algonquin Park, and one of their number is found dead. One of the party even compares it to the famous Agatha Christie novel AND THEN THERE WERE NONE.

We were in a Provincial Park, in the heart of the most populous province in Canada, yet the wilderness that had seemed so benign, so welcoming and friendly only the day-before-yesterday, had turned into a place of hostility and darkness. I contemplated the nature of civilization and wondered how thin was its veneer..

Both Leanne, failed cop and now a PI, and Craig, the group leader, know that they have a murderer in their midst. The story is told from Leanne's point of view.
This is a trip some of the canoeists should never have taken. Here Joe is talking to his wife of 3 months Rachel, to whom he had never revealed the nature of their "holiday".

“Why couldn’t we have gone to Barbados, like we planned?” Joe’s voice tightened. He was finished wheedling. “Because Richard’s bitch of a wife wanted to come on a wilderness canoe trip, that’s why. And Richard thought it would be a great opportunity to get to know each other better and see how well we work together and all that New Age shit. And you’re here now so tough luck. I need this deal to work, or I’m finished. Do you understand that? I’ve put everything we own into this deal with Richard. If it falls through I’m broke.”

I thought the descriptions of the canoeing trip, the wilderness, and the weather were well done. The story opens on a day that should have been towards the end of the trip, on day 8.  Richard is missing and is then found dead. The story then goes back to a day by day description of the expedition from Day 1 highlighting the various tensions among the group, until we reach day 8. That had a feeling of being on a railway track, although it did provide a useful structure to the novel. Having found out early on when the murder was discovered I was impatient for the intervening days to pass quickly.

I felt at the end that I had missed any clues that the author had given me about the identity of the murderer, but perhaps there weren't any. Any way, a reasonable light read.

My rating: 4.0

Reviews on MiP of other Delany titles:
4.3, VALLEY OF THE LOST
4.3, WINTER OF SECRETS
4.5, NEGATIVE IMAGE

I'm counting this as part of the e-book challenge, and the Canadian Book Challenge (where I now have one to go)

Review: NEGATIVE IMAGE, Vicki Delany

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 345 KB
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press (September 8, 2010)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• Source: I bought it.

Blurb

What would you do if you believe the person you trust most in the world has betrayed you? What would you do if you discover that the person you trust most in the world believes you capable of betrayal? 

A famous photographer arrives in Trafalgar to do a feature on mountain tourism, but also to re-connect with the woman who left him twenty-five years ago to marry another man. Today she just happens to be married to Trafalgar City Police Sergeant John Winters.
The photographer is found dead in his luxury hotel room, shot once in the back of the head, and suspicion falls upon Eliza Winters. John Winters slowly comes to realize that he doesn’t know the woman to whom he has been married for twenty-five years as well as he thought he did.
Unable to help the Sergeant, Constable Molly Smith has her own troubles: a series of B&Es has the peaceful town in an uproar, her overprotective Mountie boyfriend is fighting with her colleagues, and a vengeful stalker is watching her every move. When tragedy strikes at the heart of her own family, Molly can’t even turn to her mother, Lucky, for help.

My take
I've read three of Vicki Delany's Molly Smith series now and this, #4, is the best.
Molly has developed well as a policewoman, and she really comes alive on the page. The plot has some good strands that all come together nicely.The setting in the small Canadian town feels realistic and Delany has really fleshed the town dynamics out well. It is worth trying to track down some of the earlier titles in the series.

My rating: 4.5


Review on Reactions to Reading 
Review by Joan Barfoot who says "It's a crime not to read Vicki Delany.... one of Canada's best crime fiction writers."

Read the first chapter:  click here

Read the second chapter: click here

Vicki Delany's website

I read NEGATIVE IMAGE as part of the Canadian Reading Challenge

My other reviews:
VALLEY OF THE LOST
WINTER OF SECRETS

Review: WINTER OF SECRETS, Vicki Delany

Poisoned Pen Press 2009
264 pages
My copy was an uncorrected proof kindly sent to me by the author.

It's Christmas Eve at Trafalgar in the Kootenay area of British Columbia and there's lots of snow. It's the storm of the decade and the roads are icy. Constable Molly (Moonlight) Smith, recently off probation, is on duty overnight, and it promises to be a busy one. Just after midnight a car goes into the river.

The occupants are tourists, a couple of young men staying at a local B&B with friends. They've come to Trafalgar for the skiing. They are both pronounced dead when the car is retrieved from the river. The only trouble is that the pathologist discovers a day or two later that the passenger had been dead when the car went into the water.

I enjoyed renewing my acquaintance with Molly Smith, her mother Lucky, and her colleagues. Molly has moved on a bit since the previous title in the series: VALLEY OF THE LOST. She's now left home and living above the baker's shop. In WINTER OF SECRETS we learn what a good skier she is, and she is certainly becoming a good police woman. It was a nice solid read.

Last year the author Vicki Delany was a guest on my blog. In that post Vicki told me that WINTER OF SECRETS was a departure from her usual method of writing, an experiment she says that she won't repeat.

My rating: 4.3

Review on Reactions to Reading
Vicki Delany's website
Read the first chapter of WINTER OF SECRETS (pdf)
Vicki Delany blogs at Type M for Murder

My review of VALLEY OF THE LOST

Guest Author: Vicki Delany

Earlier this year I attended Left Coast Crime in Hawaii and had the pleasure of catching up with Vicki Delany, a Canadian author whose book VALLEY OF THE LOST I had already read and reviewed.

Vicki contacted me recently to ask if I was going to be at Bouchercon in Indianapolis, which I wasn't, and to let me know that her latest novel, the third in the Constable Molly Smith series, will hit the shops on November 1. It is being published by Poisoned Pen Press.

Vicki tells me that WINTER OF SECRETS is a departure from her usual method of writing: she called this Writing Without a Net.

Normally, I build a story this way: setting-characters-plot. That is, I decide where to set the book, who’s going to be the main character or characters and then come up with a plot. Now that I’m working on a series, steps one and two are pretty much defined before I even begin. But as for the plot – with Winter of Secrets I did something very different than the way I’ve always worked before.

For most of my adult life I was a computer programmer and then a systems analyst. I write books like I designed computer systems. I start at the end – I know who did it and why – and then I go to the beginning and create an outline that will, hopefully, chart a course to get me to that end. Like designing computer systems: you really should know what you want to achieve (i.e. is this programme going to credit the client’s account or debit it?) before you begin. I have met some computer programmes that I don’t think were ever intended to achieve anything, but that’s another matter.

I was spending Christmas 2007 in my favourite place in the world, Nelson, B.C., the inspiration for the fictional town of Trafalgar. It was snowing, quite heavily, but as is the norm in those mountains, there wasn’t any wind and the snow was falling straight down and not drifting. This, I thought, would be a mess if they had winds like we get in Ontario. And the opening scene popped into my head.

What a great idea, thinks I. I started writing the opening scene and carried on typing frantically away from there. I knew who died, but I didn’t know who killed him, or why, or even if anyone did! It was quite a strange feeling; a pure leap of hope, that I would find some inspiration down the line.

I was nearing the climax – I knew what I wanted to happen there – but I was still unsure between two possible candidates for the role of villain. Over the course of the writing, I had several people in mind, but as it evolved only two were good prospects. I felt sort of like a real Constable Molly Smith, judging the suspects and juggling clues until, with a burst of inspiration, I solved the crime!

My second drafts are usually a lot of work, but with this book, it was even more so. Because I didn’t know that X was the guilty party, I had to go back and make X know more than they seemed to and Y know less. The personality of X didn’t change much throughout the book, but it had to be tweaked a bit to make the crime more plausible, and to drop a few clues here and there. And all the clues that pointed to Y had to be toned down.

It was a fun way to go about it. Will I do that again? No. It worked because I had a very definite idea for the opening of the book and I was prepared to work my way forward from there. But all in all, I prefer to have a good outline before beginning. When I started working on the next book in the series, NEGATIVE IMAGE, I put that net up first!

WINTER OF SECRETS is the third in the Constable Molly Smith books, a traditional village/police procedural series set in the Interior of British Columbia.
Vicki is also the author of the Klondike Gold Rush series beginning with Gold Digger, set in the raucous heyday of the Klondike Gold Rush, and standalone novels of suspense.
Vicki lives in rural Prince Edward County, Ontario, where she rarely wears a watch. Visit Vicki at http://www.vickidelany.com. She blogs with five other mystery writers at http://typem4murder.blogspot.com and about the writing life, as she lives it, at http://klondikeandtrafalgar.blogspot.com

Vicki has just begun a rather gruelling schedule of promoting her book, and her full itinerary is here. If you live in Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, or Nova Scotia, check the schedule for where you might find Vicki sometime in the next 6 weeks. We wish her well. I seem to remember that last time she went on book signing tour, she broke her arm!

Review: VALLEY OF THE LOST, Vicki Delany

Poisoned Pen Press, February 2009, ISBN 978-1-59058-596-2, 291 pages

After a long and hectic day at the Trafalgar Women's Support Center Lucky Smith is savouring the peace of the quiet valley town. That's when she hears the soft cry and discovers baby Miller in the bushes alongside his dead mother. The call to police emergency goes to Lucky's daughter Moonlight, Probationary Constable Molly Smith.

The police autopsy concludes that the dead woman Ashley has died from a heroin overdose, that at some stage, not recently, she had been a regular user, but the restraint marks on her wrists and ankles cast suspicion on the manner of her death.

Lucky Smith decides to take the baby home with her until his family can be located. This act in itself causes tension in the Smith household. And then Lucky resists attempts by the representative of the Child and Youth Services, a recent arrival in the town, to take him into care.

VALLEY OF THE LOST surprised me with the complexity of its well teased out plot and interesting characters. It is the second in what the blurb calls "a traditional mystery series" featuring Molly Smith, her boss Sergeant Winters, and the town in the shadow of the glacier, Trafalgar, British Columbia. I actually feel very priveleged to have read this in ARC format.

My rating: 4.3

• Read an excerpt from the first chapter
• Vicki's website
• Vicki blogs on Fridays at Type M for Murder

Promotional trailer


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Books to look for by Vicki Delany
IN THE SHADOW OF THE GLACIER, 2007
BURDEN OF MEMORY, 2006
SCARE THE LIGHT AWAY, 2005
WHITEOUT, 2001 - recently re-released, and an Eppie Award winner in 2001

Coming in 2009:
GOLD DIGGER - A KLONDIKE MYSTERY