A Taste of Northern Spies
An unconscious body beside the railroad tracks. Police chasing whiskey runners through the park of a neighbouring town. A mysterious paper. A stolen bike. A stranger hired-on-the-spot at the town’s bakery. And then … an American visitor discovered dead in his hotel suite. Are any of these events connected? Prohibition looks to be winding down in Dorothea Montgomery’s Canadian province but has the ugly world of illegal alcohol sales come to her apparently law abiding town?
Dorothea is asked to put her “noticing” skills to work to answer these questions. And then there is the poignant issue of young hearts in love along with the knotty problem: does one include murder suspects in one’s family celebrations? In this second book of the Dorothea Montgomery series, readers re-visit the 1920’s town of Willowsdown and follow Dorothea as she unravels the skein of seemingly unrelated events with her usual gentle humour, wisdom and insight.
Pin it on a Dead Man
In 1926 even the small Canadian town of Willowsdown is caught up in the world’s Pharaoh frenzy. Dorothea Montgomery’s sister visits from England bringing with her a rare, jewel-encrusted beetle pin excavated from an Egyptian archaeological dig. At a community gathering, the good folk of Willowsdown admire its exotic splendour, but by the end of the evening the brooch has disappeared. For Dorothea, the disagreeable task of viewing neighbours as theft suspects is intensified when the town’s disliked funeral director is discovered dead in one of his own coffins. Surely no one from her town would be mixed up in theft and murder!
But if not them, then Dorothea has to consider the newcomers that the Christmas season has brought to the town – her sister and her sister’s grandchildren as well as family members of other townspeople. Why couldn’t there be an obviously sinister character with an evil laugh labouring under some curse of the Pharaohs rather than “regular” people? Even without a squinty-eyed, black-caped stranger, Dorothea’s discriminating eye for detail and her depth of understanding of human nature make her notably qualified to sort out both theft and murder.