The Suspect: Murder in a Small Town

By L.R. Wright

This Edgar Award-winning debut kicks off the crime series—and basis for the Fox TV and Hulu series Murder in a Small Town—set along Canada’s Sunshine Coast.

To Karl Alberg, the coastal town of Sechelt, just north of Vancouver, looks like the perfect place to soothe a psyche that’s been battered by 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 some nice straightforward urban crime.

In 1986 L.R. Wright’s The Suspect became the first Canadian novel to win an Edgar award, beating out titles by Ruth Rendell and Jonathan Kellerman. It went on to become a 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781937384661

Book preview

1

HE WAS A VERY OLD MAN.

When he was struck he fell over promptly, without a sound. His chair made a sound—a twisted squeak of a noise—but it let him go, made no move that George could see to clasp its wooden arms around him, hold him close to its padded back, keep him firmly upright upon its padded seat. It just gave a small squeak as its rockers skewed frantically on the polished hardwood floor; then it righted itself, gently rocked back into serenity and was finally motionless and silent.

Everything was silent, then—silent in the silent sunshine. Yet George had an impression of uproar and consternation. There was a thundering in his eighty-year-old heart, a feebleness in his antiquated knees. His body had become a horrified, garrulous commentator on calamity.

He did a slow, backward shuffle, his eyes still fixed on the empty rocking chair, and lowered himself carefully onto the chesterfield, his right hand wrapped around a cylindrical piece of brass that had once been a shell casing.

He pushed himself back on the chesterfield and let his head rest against its flowered slipcover. Then he sat up to take a large white handkerchief from his pocket and spread it on the maple coffee table, next to a vase of peonies, robustly pink. He set the shell casing carefully on top of the white fabric square. He saw that there was blood on the sleeve of his V-necked navy cardigan.

He leaned back and closed his eyes. He was surprised that his mind was so calm. He decided that his heart must be the font of whatever wisdom he possessed. It was still a place of bedlam, racketing in revulsion at Carlyle lying still and dead, half his face buried in the braided rug, bleeding neatly, discreetly, there instead of onto the hardwood floor.

But after a while even his heart became serene.

George realized that he was going to survive this astonishing thing.

He reached out and picked up the shell casing. It had a pattern of quarter-inch dots all over it, and up one side was embossed a voluptuous urn holding a single large flower. He couldn’t identify what kind of flower it was supposed to be. It had thirteen petals—he counted them—and two large leaves protruded from its stem. He wondered if Carlyle had had this peculiar decoration imposed upon the shell casing, or if it had come like that from wherever he got it.

George studied this object, his weapon, wonderingly. It was a foot high and hollow, about seven inches in diameter at the base, tapering to a little less than five inches at the top. A kind of rim was formed at the base by an indentation etched all the way around, about an eighth of an inch from the bottom. He thought it remarkable that it wasn’t even dented. Maybe skulls got frailer as bodies aged, he thought, and brought his left hand up to touch, cautiously, the top of his head. There was blood on the base, and bits of tissue or something. Maybe it was brain, thought George, detached, as he set the shell casing back on top of his handkerchief.

He didn’t like feeling so emotionless. Yet it was a relief, too. Just as Carlyle’s silence was a relief.

They’d probably have to lock him up immediately, thought George. He was sure there wasn’t any bail for murderers. And he didn’t plan to explain himself, either, which wouldn’t help.

He was curious about prison. They might put him in one of those new-fashioned places, where you had a room, instead of a cell, and got to read and eat half-decent meals. He nodded to himself, thinking, becoming more and more certain that they wouldn’t put a person of his advanced age into a maximum security facility. It might be quite an interesting experience, jail. No gardens there, though.

There was some blood on the front of his sweater, too, he noticed. It ought to make him feel sick, or panicky, but it didn’t. He was quite tranquil.

He remembered his daughter, Carol, asking when she was very young if he had ever been in jail. He had assured her vehemently that he had not, but her question had shaken him badly. He remembered that she’d been surprised and disappointed by his reply; she’d gotten the idea from somewhere that all men went to jail now and then. George had worried about their brief conversation for a long time. He tried to imagine, now, her adult reaction to his arrest and incarceration, and flinched. He deserved it, no question about that. But he saw the irony in it, and Carol, of course, would not.

Carlyle’s living room was drenched in sunshine. His body lay in it. The hardwood floor gleamed in it. There was a disquieting permanence in these moments, George thought. He was sure the sun would continue to shine steadily through the big window at precisely this angle. He was sure the earth had ceased its perambulations at last and come to rest forever at this specific point in its axis.

George continued to rest on the chesterfield, hands on his knees, and felt himself blinking stupidly at the sunshine, at the rocking chair, at the tall cabinet across the room which held a collection of china. There was no horror in the room, no disapproval. There was only the benign sunshine and the radiance of polished wood. The act of murder had apparently been swiftly absorbed, dispensed with; even George’s own body had adjusted to what it had done. This didn’t seem proper. Something judgmental ought to be happening. But the soporific sun shone in, illuminating Carlyle lying there dead with no more emphasis than it shed upon the rocking chair, or the brass-based lamp on the end table, or George’s hands, resting on his knees.

The man was dead. There was no doubt about it. There was an incontrovertible sense of absence in his stillness.

George looked vaguely around the room and continued to sit quietly, waiting for some feeling to claim him. But nothing claimed him. Nothing choked his chest, not remorse or self-satisfaction. He was empty of all things important.

He thought back to the moments of the murder. He could remember each second clearly, but the seconds didn’t accumulate neatly in his mind to form a definable experience.

He shouldn’t have come here. He hadn’t been in this house for months, and he certainly shouldn’t have come today.

He couldn’t remember what Carlyle had said to persuade him. He couldn’t remember walking here. But he remembered arriving. The front door was ajar. On either side of the concrete steps, wide and shallow, was a pot of lemon-scented geranium. They were terra-cotta pots.

The door was ajar. Carlyle had a habit of doing things like that, leaving his doors and windows open for any bright-eyed burglar to get through. When he drove a car, he had never locked it and had often left his keys in the ignition. He was never robbed, and announced this often. Never been robbed, he would say proudly. Never. Trust people; that’s my motto. His left eye would close, then. He probably thought he looked droll, winking like that, but to George he only looked like he had a left eye that wasn’t reliable any more.

Never been robbed, thought George, sitting on the flowered chesterfield. And now he’s been murdered.

Carlyle had droned on and on from his rocking chair, looking out the window at the sea. When George finally realized what he was leading up to he tried to stop him, he tried very hard to stop him, but Carlyle put up his hand and shook his head and went right on talking.

At some point George started to leave, but Carlyle said, I’m talking about your sister, George. Your family. He turned around to smile at him. Pay some respect, George. Pay some attention.

It was the smile, that mocking, knowing smile, which held George planted to the floor, his feet apart, a horrible prickling sensation moving from the middle of his back right up his spine.

Carlyle had turned back to the window, and commenced again to talk. George, behind him, told him loudly to shut up, but still Carlyle went on, his voice flat and deadly. He admitted nothing, nothing, he said such awful, dreadful things, he was going on and on…And then George looked wildly about him and saw the shell casings, two of them, identical, side by side on a bookcase shelf.

His body propelled him relentlessly toward them, his right hand grabbed one of them, he turned around and lurched toward Carlyle, who was still looking out the window, still talking, and then as if suddenly alerted Carlyle began to turn, his left hand grasping the wooden arm of the rocking chair. But the shell casing had already begun its descent. In the split second before George shut his eyes tight and the weapon crashed down upon Carlyle’s skull he saw fear in Carlyle’s eyes and knew he had seen it there before and tried to remember when, and where, and why he’d seen Carlyle terrified in the past, and it even occurred to him to ask Carlyle, but then of course it was too late.

The sound was unlike anything George had heard before. Once while he was unloading groceries from the back seat of his car a cantaloupe had hurled itself upon the concrete driveway. It was something like that.

George sighed, and rubbed his head, and wished he could weep.

He wanted to go home. He wasn’t ready yet for the hustle and bustle of being arrested. He was too tired to answer people’s questions, to explain to his lawyer, who had never handled anything more complicated than a will or a real estate transaction, that he now had a murderer for a client. He had to have time to rest, to prepare himself.

Gradually, as he sat thinking, it occurred to George that to give himself up was pointless. Even stupid. When they caught up with him, fine. He’d go to trial and to prison without complaining, with dignity, even, if he could manage it. But to spend any more time locked up than was absolutely necessary—it made no sense.

Besides, he thought, it had been self-defense, in a way. The man had been babbling wickedly about things he didn’t understand and had no right to know, trying to hurt him with them, as though George hadn’t been hurting always, throughout his adult life, since long before he met Carlyle. And George knew Carlyle had been going to confess, too, to things George had struggled for years to put from his mind.

It was lucky he’d worn his dark blue sweater, he thought, struggling up out of the soft-cushioned chesterfield. The spots and splotches on it could be anything at all.

He hobbled on prickly half-asleep legs into the kitchen, where a fish in a plastic bag lay in the sink. Even this, the sight of Carlyle’s never-to-be-eaten lunch, couldn’t move him. He rummaged around in drawers until he found some big paper grocery bags. Into one of them he loaded the shell casings; he wasn’t sure why he took them both, but he did. He stuffed his handkerchief, marked now with Carlyle’s blood, into his back pocket. Then he shuffled cautiously over to where the body lay. He didn’t get too close to it, because he didn’t want to look at any more of the head than he had to.

Carlyle’s eyes were open. George’s heart twisted in a sudden, painful spasm. For a moment he thought Carlyle was alive after all, and he felt an awesome relief. I’ll leave this time, he told himself; this time I’ll leave, quickly, before he can do any more talking, any more harm. But Carlyle wasn’t alive. His eyes were open, but he was dead. He seemed to be gazing across the floor at the heat register in the wall behind the chesterfield.

George went slowly down the hall, slightly stooped from the burden of the shell casings in the paper bag, lodged under one arm. He opened the front door, which he had closed when he entered the house.

Nothing had changed. The sea still slurped from behind the house, the bees still buzzed around the marguerites and marigolds filling the flower beds beneath the windows on either side of Carlyle’s front door. He wondered how long he’d been in there and decided it wasn’t nearly as long as it felt.

He went out onto the concrete step and turned to shut the door. As he turned, he brushed against the geranium in one of the terra-cotta pots, which released from its leaves the scent of lemon. It seemed to accompany him up the gravel path, through the laurel hedge, along the road, and into his own house, half a mile from Carlyle’s.

It wasn’t until he had washed off the shell casing and put it on his living room windowsill with its mate, changed his clothes, and put the kettle on for tea that he suddenly remembered Carlyle’s goddamn parrot.

2

JUST NORTH OF VANCOUVER, there is a wide blue crack in the continent called Howe Sound, 10 miles wide. Across it, the province of British Columbia juts abruptly west and then extends northward for almost a thousand miles. Its intricate coastline is fissured by innumerable inlets and channels, cluttered by countless small islands, and is at first sheltered from the open Pacific by Vancouver Island, 285 miles long.

Highway 1, the Trans-Canada, comes to a halt on the shores of Howe Sound, at Horseshoe Bay. Ferries leaving from here provide the only access to the Sechelt Peninsula, otherwise known as the Sunshine Coast.

This is the southernmost forty-five miles of that long, long coastline. Along its seaside are towns and villages called Langdale, Granthams Landing, Gibsons, Roberts Creek, Wilson Creek, Selma Park, Sechelt, Halfmoon Bay, Secret Cove, Madeira Park, Garden Bay, Irvines Landing, Earls Cove.

Gibsons, at the southern end, has a population of 3,000 and was named for the first white settler there. Only about 1,000 people live in the village of Sechelt, which is a native Indian word that some people say means a place of shelter from the sea. But Sechelt is in the middle of the Sunshine Coast and is a service center for several thousand more people who live and work nearby.

This part of British Columbia gets more hours of sunshine every year than most places in Canada—five hundred more hours, on the average, than Vancouver. Because its winters are also very mild, things grow here that will not grow anywhere else in the country—apricot and fig trees, even palm trees, it is said.

There is only one major road, a two-lane highway that follows the coastline for eighty miles and then ends.

In the summer the area is clogged with tourists, even though it is not a quickly accessible place. Getting there depends upon ferry schedules, and once you’ve arrived, traversing the coastline takes time because the narrow highway is winding and hilly.

The tempo of life on the Sunshine Coast is markedly slower than that of Vancouver, and its people, for the most part strung out along the shoreline, have a more direct and personal interest in the sea.

The coastal forests are tall and thick with undergrowth, but they come gently down to the water and are sometimes met there by wide, curving beaches. The land cleared for gardens is fertile, and the things growing there tempt wild creatures from the woods. In the sea there are salmon, and oysters, and clams; there are also otters, and thousands of gulls, and cormorants. There are Indian legends, and tales of smugglers, and the stories of the pioneers.

The resident police force is the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, with detachments in Gibsons and Sechelt. There are traffic accidents to deal with, and occasional vandalism, and petty theft, and some drunkenness now and then.

There is very seldom a murder.

3

GEORGE WAITED FOR HIS TEA to steep, and as he waited he struggled with an image which thrust itself at him again and again: Carlyle’s corpse, rotting, little by little, while somewhere nearby a raucous green bird slowly starved to death in its cage.

It was ridiculous, he knew that. Nobody could rot, undisturbed, in his own house; not in Sechelt. People paid too much attention to one another, in Sechelt.

But what if, just this once, they didn’t? He couldn’t dislodge this possibility from his mind.

George contemplated his situation with profound reluctance. It was early June, and the Sunshine Coast was dry and warm. It didn’t seem unreasonable to wait until the sky clouded over before going off to jail. This was probably the last dry sunny spell he’d know as a free man. He had no delusions on that score. He knew they’d catch up with him sooner or later. He had begun to hope, though, that he might first enjoy another season in his garden.

He poured his tea and lowered himself into his leather chair and addressed himself to the problem of Carlyle’s pet.

He had seen very little of Carlyle in the last while and as little as possible before that. But Sechelt was a small place and he hadn’t been able to avoid him entirely. Therefore he knew all about the bird. Its name was Tom, and Carlyle had doted on it. Since it had made no sound, neither word nor squawk, during George’s time inside the house, its cage must have been covered; this, he had been told, was the only way to shut the bird up. And since George hadn’t noticed a cloth-covered cage while he was there, Carlyle must have had the creature stashed away in another room. But the damn bird would be there somewhere, all right, and although George disliked parrots, that seemed a poor reason for letting it die for lack of food.

It wouldn’t die, he told himself firmly, sipping his tea. Someone was bound to find Carlyle soon. Maybe he had an appointment with somebody that very afternoon. When he didn’t show up, he’d be checked on, all right. Somebody was always checking on you, once you got into your eighties. And you often couldn’t tell from their voices or their faces whether they were relieved or disappointed to find you still alive. He knew this from his visits to the old folks in the hospital.

How long could a parrot live without having its food and water replenished? he wondered. Carlyle might have filled up its dishes the minute before George arrived. Or he might not. It might be time for its next meal right now. Surely it wasn’t stupid enough to remain silent through hunger and thirst, just because a cloth blocked its view of the world outside its cage.

George stared out the window toward his garden and the sea and concentrated. He’d have to go back there, unless he was willing to let the damn parrot die. He’d have to remove the cover from the cage and sneak away, hoping the bird’s shrill cries would penetrate the walls of the house, and the laurel hedge, and catch the ears of the couple who lived closest to Carlyle.

Even if he added water and food to the cage himself, assuming he could find whatever it was the damned bird ate, he’d still have to rely eventually on the parrot’s making its condition known to the neighbors. And if it didn’t, then when the Mounties finally showed up they’d find one dead man and one dead bird.

After a while he got up and phoned Carlyle’s house, hoping to find that the police were already there, but nobody answered. For a moment he almost expected Carlyle, dead, to pick up the phone, and laugh at him, or wheeze curses into his ear. The phone rang and rang and he imagined Carlyle’s open eyes focusing, his battered head lifting, his limp white hands flexing, pushing his body to its knees; George could almost hear his breathing begin again, and the grunting sounds he would make as he dragged himself off the rug onto the bare wood floor and crawled toward the kitchen, heading for the telephone to complete their interrupted conversation.

He hung up abruptly.

Reviews for The Suspect

[c. lentz · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a marvelous book! Fascinating people that you would love to know in a beautiful setting. Mysteries within mysteries without savagery or gore but gripping you to the last page. An intelligent engrossing read!

[romonko · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book won The Edgar Prize in 1985, much to the surprise of all the other nominated authors and publishers. I thought I would read this book for that reason and because I enjoyed the series opener that was on television this fall. The book is very well-written, but really the pace is quite slow and we already know who the murdererer is in the first chapter. It surprised me too that it won this award. But for someone who enjoys cozy mysteries and loves Canadian literature, I did enjoy the premise. The book is set along the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia, so the setting for this series is in one of Canada’s nicest locations. I wasn’t quite as enthralled with the characters in the book. I found it difficult to warm up to them. Therefore, I’m not sure whether I will continue with this series or not.

[majkia · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting and surprising beginning of a Canadian mystery series. I liked how uncomfortable Karl can be in situations. He's not the typical cop. He's vulnerable, crotchety at times, and stubborn. He's also sometimes needy.

The victim was well portrayed and complex with depths and surprises. The mystery, while we knew who dunnit from the beginning, was still intriguing enough to hold my interest easily.

[nkmunn · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

What I liked: The setting - from the broad brushstrokes of the locale, to the gardens and on to the detailed interiors, and sometimes right down to a piece of furniture or a decorative ornament . The characters - who do not stay put in their typecasting.

[absurdeist · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Finished L.R. Wright's first mystery novel The Suspect (her fourth published novel) and I've had the unrelenting suspicion that it is a perfect book. At first I wouldn't give it ten out of ten stars, I thought to myself that maybe I'd give it nine stars, or 9.5, only because I'm not completely convinced that the forensics Wright depicted in the novel were as thoroughly fleshed out and considered as they would have been in so-called real life. But, maybe, in 1984, in a backwoods town on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, reachable only by ferry boat, the crime was investigated as thoroughly as it could have been back then. Maybe L. R. Wright got it right. In real life, would there have been enough evidence to convict the suspect, an eighty-year-old, cantankerous widower, George Wilcox? Maybe not. Maybe that's why Karl Alberg, the divorced detective on the case, could never nail him. Maybe L. R. Wright thought up the perfect scenario for the perfect, spontaneous, unpremeditated murder, that not even Sherlock Holmes could have solved.

Whether this perfect murder is 100% plausible or not, The Suspect, like I stated at the outset, if not a perfect novel, is a perfect read. But, damn, if this mystery, set amidst so much sunshine and blue sparkling ocean, among seaside cottages, with their tended gardens extending almost to the tide, is not a brooding, downright gloomy, read. Understand that the fog will snuff out the sunshine by the end.

"This part of British Columbia gets more hours of sunshine every year than most places in Canada—five hundred more hours, on the average, than Vancouver. Because its winters are also very mild, things grow here that will not grow anywhere else in the country—apricot and fig trees, even palm trees, it is said."

So much understated loss in this novel, only hinted at, a glimpse of it here, or there — a sunbeam exposing secret griefs, resentment, and rage — page upon sad but unputdownable page. Wright never overstates a clue — not once, but leaves it up to you, one of her rare readers these days, to scrunch up your eyes and forehead, to deduce and decide. How? Why? When?

What amazed me most about the novel, is how well Wright indeed made perfectly plausible this complex dynamic between, Karl Alberg, the transplant detective, claiming as bona fide friend, the murderer, George Wilcox, the very man whom Alberg knew beyond all doubt had committed the crime. But with limited manpower and investigative resources, Alberg just couldn't find enough evidence or establish corroboration between any two eyewitnesses, to pin it on him, to make the arrest. What an unexpected, emotionally powerful read, especially watching evolve an implausible-but-not-impossible friendship between adversaries develop like that, watching their friendship poignantly and unexpectedly bloom. A friendship only fully realized months after one of the men has died.

"The tempo of life on the Sunshine Coast is markedly slower than that of Vancouver, and its people, for the most part strung out along the shoreline, have a more direct and personal interest in the sea.

The coastal forests are tall and thick with undergrowth, but they come gently down to the water and are sometimes met there by wide, curving beaches. The land cleared for gardens is fertile, and the things growing there tempt wild creatures from the woods. In the sea there are salmon, and oysters, and clams; there are also otters; and thousands of gulls, and cormorants. There are Indian legends, and tales of smugglers, and the stories of the pioneers.

The resident police force is the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, with detachments in Gibsons and Sechelt. There are traffic accidents to deal with, and occasional vandalism, and petty theft, and some drunkenness now and then.

There is very seldom a murder."

Yes, George Wilcox has just murdered his eighty-five year old neighbor, Carlyle, when we meet him on the first page. Carlyle was apparently an "old acquaintance" (certainly not a friend), though by the end of the novel we'll discover the man Wilcox murdered was much more than an acquaintance, even if he wasn't exactly a friend. L. R. Wright gives away the who-did-it? right off the bat, providing the reader with more intimate knowledge of the crime's grisly details than afforded any character in the novel's except for the elderly perp. And what a disturbing way to meet someone, even a fictitious character, our "suspect" of the novel's title. In two previous (non-mystery) novels I've read that opened as violently — and I'm just talking about violence against animals here (i.e., Ron Loewinsohn's Magnetic Field(s) and Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke), I've found it difficult to continue reading. But that was not the case with The Suspect, because unlike these novels, and for reasons I do not yet completely comprehend, I cared about this very believable, complicated man, the suspect, the murderer, the old man riddled by guilt and one too many demons. Chalk it up, as well, to Wright's extraordinary penchant for creating a conflicted and torn character with the same double-minded authenticity on the page. The Suspect transcends the mystery genre. Call it a mystery if you must, but call it literature too. No real surprise that Wright's first three novels were literary fiction.

L. R. Wright beat both Ruth Rendell and Paul Auster, among others, for the 1986 Edgar Award. Wright, to this day, remains the only Canadian author to have ever won the Edgar. Had The Suspect been nominated for The Booker Prize that year, as it should have been, I suspect it would have won at least one more award. Before L.R. Wright, 61, died on February 25, 2001, she got the last word in on her long battle against breast cancer: “She died, and the cancer died with her. It was a draw.”

[auntieknickers · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Having just read Scottoline's THE VENDETTA DEFENSE, I came upon another book with over-80 victim and perpetrator: L. R. Wright's
THE SUSPECT, read as part of my ongoing project to read Edgar Best
Novels in order. In THE SUSPECT, just as in THE VENDETTA DEFENSE, we know
from the outset who 'done it.' But here, each of the three characters
through whose point of view the story is told -- killer, policeman, and
a librarian with conflicted loyalties -- shows us a different aspect of
the case. The real mystery in THE SUSPECT is motive -- and in a way
that's even a mystery to the perpetrator. This book will almost
certainly end up on my 10 Best Older Books list for 2009. It's a
stunning combination of psychological thriller and police procedural.
I'll be looking for more of L. R. Wright's work, and am only sorry for
the relatively small number of books she wrote before her too-early
death.

[smik_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

We are in no doubt about who committed the murder in THE SUSPECT, as we, the readers, are present when George Wilcox did it, so the interest centres on two aspects: why did he do it, and will he get away with it?
The other element though is the introduction of a new sleuthing pair, newly arrived Mountie Karl Alberg and local librarian Cassandra Mitchell. However they don't know that George is the murderer although both of them come to that realisation. They react quite differently to that knowledge.

THE SUSPECT is a cleverly written story on a number of levels and one of those that you come to appreciate more as you write about it. No wonder it won the Edgar for best novel in 1985.

Laurali R. Wright died from breast cancer in 2001 and there is a comprehensive biography on her official site that leaves us in no doubt about what a loss that was.

THE SUSPECT is a quick read, so if you can find a copy, read it, and see if you agree with me.

[annbury_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This first class psychological thriller by Canadian writer L.R. Wright has been compared to the best of Nordic crime fiction, deservedly so. The story, set in a beautiful small town on British Columbia's sheltered "Sunshine Coast", involves a small number of (mostly) likable people, their relationships with each other, and their relationships with their own demons. The plot is masterfully constructed and highly suspenseful, even though it doesn't work the same way it does in most crime fiction. I'm delighted to have discovered this writer (courtesy of Felony and Mayhem) and look forward to reading more of the writer's works.

[devenish_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The story of 'The Suspect' takes place in a small town in Canada. Two old men meet and within a few minutes one of them kills the other. (I'm not giving anything away here,as it is quite apparent from the beginning who the murderer is) What is less certain is why the murder has occurred and what has driven a seemingly well-respected man to do this terrible deed. There is of course the usual investigation and the usual clues are picked up along the way. In the course of his investigation the policeman in charge of the case becomes involved with the local librarian. These three main characters - murderer,policeman and librarian interact in perhaps,curious ways as the story unfolds and the conclusion is far from the usual in this type of book
This is by turns sad,touching and disturbing. I understand this is the first of a series and I look forward to reading more by L.R.Wright.

[thornton37814 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This mystery is a bit unconventional in that we know from the beginning that George who lives on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia murdered his neighbor. George is an 80-year-old man who would normally never murder someone. George is an avid library user, and Staff Sgt. Karl Alberg, the investigating officer, answers a personal ad from Cassandra the librarian. Will George get away with murder?

This is a cross between a police procedural, a cozy mystery, and a psychological study of how murder affects the one who commits it. I think the third element in this is what makes this book interesting. The author did a good job limiting the number of characters and keeping them well-drawn.

[cbl_tn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was different than the mysteries I usually read because it isn't a whodunit. The reader knows whodunit by the end of the third sentence. Although it features a police detective, it's more cozy than police procedural, set as it is in a small town on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast. Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg's budding relationship with librarian Cassandra Mitchell adds a touch of romance to the novel, but blurs the line between work and pleasure when both realize that a good friend of Cassandra's is the prime suspect in the murder Alberg is investigating. In a crime novel where the murderer's identity is known from the beginning, character development is crucial, and Wright proves herself equal to the task with Alberg and Mitchell. This is a series I know I'll return to.

[michaelm42071 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Karl Alberg is the ranking Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer in the tiny seaside town of Sechelt, on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast near Vancouver. Alberg investigates the murder of an eighty-five-year-old man by his neighbor, who is only a few years younger. We know who did it from the first page of the book, so this is not the traditional whodunit, but a book about how the cop will solve it—that is, it’s a police procedural—but it’s also a psychological tale about why the killer did it.
Stories that begin, as this one does, with the reader’s watching the killer commit murder are sometimes known as “inverted” mysteries. The form, very familiar to anyone who watched Peter Falk’s Columbo series on television, was invented in the early twentieth century by R. Austin Freeman, a British writer whose detective, Dr. Thorndyke, was a forensic scientist. The interest was in the way small clues the reader may have missed in the opening description of the crime lead to the discovery of the criminal. In police procedurals, the identity of the criminal is not always known from the beginning, though it sometimes becomes obvious early in the investigation, and then the interest shifts to how the police will find the evidence to catch the killer.
About the time Alberg becomes convinced that the neighbor, whose name is George, must have done it, George becomes convinced that Alberg will catch him. But there are complications. The killer is the friend of the woman, a local librarian, whom Alberg began to date after she put a personal ad in the Vancouver paper. We suspect the Mountie will get his man, but will getting his man prevent the Mountie from getting his woman?
Listeners to these commentaries know that I prefer mysteries that stick to the problem at hand, move right along, and do not spend unnecessary pages on deep characterization and elaborate subplots. But I was taken with the way Wright handles the very human difficulties here. The killer is a crusty but amiable geezer whose judgment that the victim had it coming seems eminently fair. His friend the librarian knows him only as a frequenter of the library who brings her flowers and plants, sometimes gruffly insisting that she take them home rather than decorate the library with them. Alberg likes the killer, but still thinks, almost haplessly, that his duty requires him to discourage people from killing one another. I liked this one is spite of myself.
L. R. Wright is Laurali Rose Wright and is the only Canadian to have won the American Mystery Writers’ award, the Edgar Allan Poe award, for this mystery, which was published in 1985 and was the first to feature Karl Alberg. She wrote eight more mysteries with Alberg as the detective, and several more with a woman RCMP detective, before her death in 2001

[tripleblessings_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

#1 in the series (1985) with RCMP Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg, and librarian Cassandra Mitchell, set in BC's sunshine coast.
Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel (mystery). Very good.