Petra's Ghost by C.S. Cinneide

Petra’s is not the only ghost

A physically and metaphysically grueling journey across the Spanish countryside on the Camino de Santiago, under the brilliant sun and deep in the shadows of Daniel’s psyche.

Tortured by his wife’s death a year earlier and unable to make any decisions about increasingly urgent matters in his family and business, he trudges through the days seeking relief from his grief and the nights hoping for oblivion. He meets, walks with, parts from other pilgrims, each toting their own burden of secrets and myths from their homeland, each seeking an elusive peace that may be in the next cathedral, at the next shrine, or nowhere at all. The nights and sometimes the days are haunted by memories and by visions of the Santa Compaña, the Holy Ones, who are doomed to walk the pilgrim’s way for eternity. Irish Daniel calls them banshees while trying to convince himself they don’t exist.

How much to reveal, and how much to hide, is an ever-shifting metric for Daniel, never more than with Ginny, the young American woman he gradually becomes more comfortable with.

“Safe topics that skirt around his life with Petra and her death, like pieces of a puzzle purposely left  out  of  the  box.  Harbouring  his  own  missing  pieces, watching for hints of hers.”  P. 105

The mystery reveals itself in fragments like the shifting views as pilgrims trudge around a hill: a blend of the psychological, spiritual, and potentially criminal. The unfolding story of Petra’s long dying seeps into present-day iterations of the dangers lurking for women unprotected. A young woman vanished on the trail, her body never found. A friendly Dutchman and an oafish Englishman have been there before; did they meet her, hurt her, kill her? Is she the banshee haunting Daniel, luring him off the trail into cornfields and graveyards? As the days pass and each night brings a new terror or temptation, he grasps for elusive facts. Even Ginny’s secrets take more ominous form in his mind.

‘Petra’s Ghost’ is a tale of love, loss, and guilt. The writing is mesmerizing, the scenery and customs of the Camino compelling as only first-hand experience can be.

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 C.S. O'Cinneide (oh-ki-nay-da) is a writer and a blogger on her website, She Kills Lit, where she features women writers of thriller and noir. Her debut novel, Petra’s Ghost is a dark thriller set on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, where a woman has disappeared. The book was inspired by real events that occurred when the author walked the ancient five-hundred-mile pilgrimage in 2015. 

 https://www.shekillslit.com/
  

 J.E. (Jayne) Barnard is a Calgary-based writer of award-winning women's fiction: The Maddie Hatter Adventures for daring spirits aged 10 to 100, and The Falls Mysteries, contemporary psychological suspense set in the Alberta foothills

Review: The Whisper of Legends by Barbara Fradkin

 This ninth book of the series drags Inspector Green far outside his comfort zone. 

When his daughter Hannah hits the whitewater on the breathtakingly beautiful and dangerously isolated Nahanni River, vague parental worries soon solidify into well-founded concern, for Green if not for the wilderness area’s more trekker-hardened RCMP.

 Disturbing facts come to light about the expedition’s leader. A freak storm washes one of the group’s canoes downstream. Mining consortiums war with environmentalists. Soon Green and Sullivan are on their way to the Yukon, hoping to find Hannah before the rising tensions rend her group and leave her stranded in a trackless, perilous wilderness. Desk-bound Green forces himself past physical and psychological weaknesses in an unfamiliar and hostile environment, where grizzlies and wolves are no longer the most dangerous predators.

 

Part family saga, part a thoughtful exploration of the growing conflict between environmental and resource-extraction priorities, “Whisper of Legends” is an adrenaline-fueled adventure, nearly impossible to put down.

The Whisper of Legends

Barbara Fradkin

Dundurn 2013

A Green Place for Dying - by RJ Harlick

 

Last night I opened ‘A Green Place for Dying’, the fifth Meg Harris novel by RJ Harlick, just released by Dundurn.

It's five a.m. and I’m still up.

This is one seductive book. It opened on a moonlit scene by still waters, with a group of mostly native women doing a renewal ritual. Before I knew it I was thigh-deep in soggy brush looking for a missing teenager. Then confronting an angry biker. Now someone else is missing, someone even more dear to Meg.

‘A Green Place for Dying’ is set along the Ontario/Quebec border, partly in bush and partly in Ottawa. The bush town of Somerset and the neighbouring Migiskan reserve are like the quaint, albeit murderous, village in the Louise Penny novels in that everyone knows everyone else’s business, or thinks they do. But here the village store sells venison pie and other wild-based foods instead of the designer dainties of Three Pines’ bakery, and the characters are more at home in jeans and deerskin jackets than in high-end sweaters. The story revolves around a touchy social issue: missing native women for whom the police don’t bother searching. There’s also a deeply unhappy local family with a black sheep brother and a missing daughter that Meg is helping to trace. An old secret in Meg’s past is rising to haunt her just when she needs to keep a clear head.

Not noir, and definitely not a cosy despite the lack of on-page violence, this novel is a traditional, suspenseful mystery in a non-traditional setting. The bush is an integral element, its sights, sounds, scents, and textures underpinning crucial scenes and drawing the reader deep inside the tensions and joys of the half-French, half-Native, half-English community with its crisscrossing lines of culture, language, and authority. 

You don’t need to have read the other books to really get this one; references to past events are understandable in their context. Highly recommended.

Sample the opening HERE