It’s been thirteen months since Calamity (Callie) Barnstable inherited a house in Marketville under the condition that she search for the person who murdered her mother thirty years earlier. She solves the mystery, but what next? Unemployment? Another nine-to-five job in Toronto?
Callie decides to set down roots in Marketville, take the skills and knowledge she acquired over the past year, and start her own business: Past & Present Investigations.
It’s not long before Callie and her new business partner, best friend Chantelle Marchand, get their first client: a woman who wants to find out everything she can about her grandmother, Anneliese Prei, and how she came to a “bad end” in 1956. It sounds like a perfect first assignment. Except for one thing: Anneliese’s past winds its way into Callie’s present, and not in a manner anyone—least of all Callie—could have predicted.
This is book 2 in the bestselling Marketville Mystery series, continuing Calamity (Callie) Barnstable's journey after Skeletons in the Attic. This time she's started her own private investigator firm specializing in cold cases, and assembled a team that includes a self-proclaimed psychic, an expert in geneology, and a research librarian. Her first cold case takes her on a search for the truth about a woman murdered in 1956, but it also takes her to some very personal, and unexpected connections. This book is set in Canada, with considerable historic research, including train schedules, ocean liners and ephemera. I think this is my favorite book of the six I have written.
Amazon Ratings: 4.3 (62)
Goodreads: 4.45 (119)
Chapter 1
It’s been thirteen months since I received the phone call, a detached voice on the other end telling me that my father had died in an unfortunate occupational accident. Thirteen months since I sat in Leith Hampton’s Toronto law office for the reading of my father’s will. Thirteen months since I found out that I, Calamity Barnstable, answers to Callie, had inherited a house in Marketville.
It was a house I didn’t know existed. In a commuter town better suited to families with two kids, a cat, and a collie than a thirty-six-year-old single female who thrived on the anonymity of city life and condo living.
If that wasn’t overwhelming enough, there was a catch. According to the terms of my father’s will, I was required to move into the house for one year and find out who had murdered my mother thirty years earlier. A mother who disappeared when I was six years old, and one I barely remembered—a state of mind encouraged by my aforementioned father.
To say that my comfortable, condo-living existence as a bank call center clerk was flipped upside down would be an understatement. One month I was fielding queries about lost credit cards and debit card fraud, and the next month I was acting like some sort of unofficial private investigator.
The house my father had bequeathed to me was nestled within a cul-de-sac chock-full of well maintained 1970s bungalows, split-levels, and semis, the streets named after provincial wildflowers.
Unfortunately my inheritance was the singular notable exception. The front lawn had long ago succumbed to dandelions and twitch grass. The roof had been patched without any attention to matching the existing shingles. The windows were spattered with bird droppings, dirt, and bits of egg from Halloweens past. Some houses needed a little bit of TLC. What this house needed was a good coat of fire.
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German
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Unavailable for translation.
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Portuguese
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Already translated.
Translated by Gerson Loyola de Aguilar
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Author review: Prompt and courteous. |
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Spanish
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Unavailable for translation.
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