Burden of Memory

Description

Praise for Burden of Memory... "A breath of fresh air from north of the border...a richly textured and highly satisfying read." -Publishers Weekly "Leisurely puzzles steeped in family dynamics and flavored with descriptions of beautiful scenery." -Booklist Elaine Benson, a successful novelist who jettisoned her career over an unreliable screenwriter, is now divorced, broke, and has come to a primitive, untamed northern forest on Lake Muskoka to interview for a job. Elderly Miss Moira Madison of the fabulously rich Canadian Madisons wishes to write her memoirs. Miss Madison wants to leave a record of her life, especially of her years with the Canadian Army Nursing Sisters of World War II. Her service in the British and then European theater was filled with triumphs and bitter losses that forever shaped her life. Settling into the family cottage and what remains of a lifestyle long gone, Elaine rediscovers her love of researching the past. But then she discovers the first writer Miss Madison hired had drowned in the Lake. And now her own project stirs someone to murder.... A former systems analyst in the high-pressure financial world, Vicki Delany is settling down to life in bucolic Prince Edward County, Ontario, where she rarely wears a watch. As well as writing novels of modern psychological suspense, Vicki is the author of the Constable Molly Smith traditional village mystery series, recently optioned for Canadian television. www.vickidelany.com

Having taken early retirement from her job as a systems analyst in the high-pressure financial world, Vicki Delany is settling down to the rural life in bucolic, Prince Edward County, Ontario where she rarely wears a watch.

Novels about military nurses are relatively rare. This one is more so, because it's a story about a World War II Canadian military nurse - written within the reticulum of an upper-class Ontario family. Delany's military nurse, Moira, now in her eighties, engages a professional journalist to write her memoirs, and tells the journalist, ""I want this to be a story of the life of one Canadian woman,"" adding, ""it's hard to get women's stories told and once told, heard....""Not only is this a fascinating mystery, but to use Noah Richter's phrase, Delany gives the reader a real ""sense of Canadian place...""But in this historical fiction, there is another ""sense of place"" given: the feeling of being a Canadian military nurse in the UK and some parts of Europe during WW II. Chapters about those experiences and two years of post-war nursing in England are interwoven with those of decades of life at the cottage...the mystery of the ""burden"" carried by this WW II nurse makes for utterly fascinating reading. --Shirley Stinson, Canadian Association for the History of Nursing Newsletter (Fall 2006)