First of a new cosy series by Dorothy St James

This small town mystery centers on the local library being threatened with losing all its books in favour of a digital-only revolution. Our heroine – and the books’/readers’ – is mild-mannered library assistant Trudell. She’s trying to capture a street cat and secretly saving books from the soon-to-be-dumpstered collection when the chief architect of the revolution meets an unscheduled end.

This is a fun-enough book for an idle evening, quite light, and with some physically comic moments. There are several fascinating snippets about book history and construction sprinkled throughout. The main and secondary characters are likeable if a bit flat. The relevant clues seemed to me to jump off the page, but our intrepid heroine did not put one and one together, let alone two and two. The cat was a nice touch, leading to several cute moments and revealing the most humanizing aspect of the returning police detective’s personality.

Although it’s the first in a new series the ongoing character motivations are lacking. There doesn’t seem any compelling reason for readers to root for these characters over any others going forward.

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"The Ancient Dead" can still impact the living

This novel opens with a love song to the prairies’ people, places, and history. Set partly amid the Drumheller hoodoos, the mystery starts with a dinosaur bone hunt and delves into the dusty secrets of a prairie ranching family. Although well-grounded in the present, the plot has thirty-year old roots that, over the decades, bind the characters and the landscape from Drumheller to Fort Mac and into Calgary’s oil-company office towers as surely as the long roots of prairie grasses tangle beneath gently rolling pastures..  

The series lead, 30-something Amanda Doucette, is supposed to be on a mixed work-and-holiday trip with her main squeeze, setting up another teen adventure outing in Alberta's arid southeast between Drumheller and the Milk River valley. A chance encounter with a familiar farmhouse yanks her into an old mystery involving her own family.

As she juggles the competing demands of the job, her clouded family history, a local mystery that seems somehow entwined, and her future with her increasingly frustrated partner, there's suspense tugging the reader in at least three directions. Will she learn what happened at that farmhouse? Will her relationship survive when yet another romantic getaway is sidetracked by crime? Who is still trying to cover up a 30-year old secret, and why?

Part travelogue, part exploration of parallel family secrets, this crime novel is a good fit for both mystery readers and anyone trying to navigate the tricky questions of love and relationships in our highly mobile modern society.

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