Scare the Light Away

Description

Recent widow Rebecca McKenzie, a successful Vancouver businesswoman, returns to Hope River after a thirty-year absence to attend her mother's funeral, but the discovery of her mother's old diaries and the disappearance of a young local girl, a crime in which her brother becomes the prime suspect, force her to launch an investigation into the case.

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. Unreasonable Doubt is the eighth mystery in her Constable Molly Smith series. Vicki Delany won the 2019 Derrick Murdoch Award for contributions to the crime genre.

The idea of a woman returning for the first time in the 30 years since she fled from her dysfunctional, small-town family gets a poetic, honest and believably frightening treatment in this first mystery by Vicki Delany, one of Canada's most promising new practitioners of the crime genre. (I should note that Poisoned Pen Press has agreed--for reasons best known to its editors--to publish a collection of my reviews and essays in the fall.) A major part of Delany's success is the mixture of love and anger with which she describes life in Hope River, the Ontario village where Rebecca McKenzie grew up and where little has changed since she escaped, first to Toronto and then to Vancouver. We walked silently back to the house, McKenzie says. The cloud blanket dispersed as night settled in but the moon had not yet risen. With no high leafy trees to shade them, the harsh yellow light from the street lamps shone far too bright, blocking any sight of stars on this clear night. But the heartbreaking spine of Scare the Light Away is the diary of McKenzie's mother, a revealing and vivid document that not only helps advance the mystery's plot (a young girl has been murdered, and McKenzie's troubled brother is a leading suspect) but that also shows how bleak life was in Hope River during World War II--especially when one of the men left behind was a British war bride's insane father-in-law. Delany does everything right, adding enough twists to a familiar story to make her Hope River, past and present, the place from which we all could have escaped. -- Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune (6 March 2005)