L R Wright

"Another triumph for Wright" --The Idaho Statesman There is a murder here, no question, but readers craving a simple whodunit should look elsewhere: The real mystery is why Maria, a pleasant, placid housewife, abandoned her family for seven years. This question is nagging at Sergeant Karl Alberg, even as Cassandra Mitchell, Alberg's longtime companion, is doing some nagging of her own--he had promised, after all, to hang up his policeman's hat. As always in this series, the great pleasure is in the intricate interplay of personalities, especially nuanced in Mother Love. Not surprisingly, the book won Wright her second Crime Writers of Canada Award for Best Novel, and was the first mystery ever to win the Canadian Authors' Association Literary Prize for Fiction.

Read along with the new TV drama, coming this Fall on FOX TV and Hulu To Karl Alberg, a small town on Canada's Sunshine Coast looks like the perfect place to soothe a psyche that's been battered by too much big-city police work. Bees buzz among the roses, and the local librarian is attractive, intriguing, and unattached. Perhaps he has at last come in from the cold. But sunny towns can conceal a lot of secrets--some of them bleak enough to make a man yearn for nice straightforward urban crime. Certainly that would be simpler than unraveling the brutal, unlikely, and unpremeditated murder of an eighty-five-year-old man In 1986 The Suspect beat out titles by Ruth Rendell and Jonathan Kellerman to become the first Canadian novel to win an Edgar Award. It went on to become a great cult favorite among mystery fans, who prized its delicately etched sense of melancholy and intriguing character studies of the cop, his quarry, and the enigmatic librarian who proves an unlikely bridge between the two.