53. The Suspect by L.R. Wright

I discovered this author and series because after decades, her work has finally successfully made it to the TV screen in the form of the new Canadian series Murder in a Small Town.  I backtracked to realize the books were written in the 80s and take place in and around Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast in B.C., which we visited last summer.  I found this, the first one, at The Book Exchange used English language bookstore in Amsterdam.  There were several others, but I wanted to see if I like it first.  Also, I suspect these should not be hard to find when I am next in B.C.

It starts out with a bit of a twist in that you the reader knows who committed the murder right from the beginning.  One old man, visiting another old man, bashes him suddenly over the head with an old shell casing.  The murderer recognizes his guilt and is about to turn himself in when realizes  why bother, as he will get caught eventually, he might as well live free for as long as he can. It's subtler and more nuanced than that, but you get the picture.  It's more of a "whydunnit" (I stole that from a Goodreads review), as well as an interesting cat and mouse game between he and the detective.

The detective is Karl Alberg, promoted from Kamloops where he had to leave his family behind as his wife had a successful business and his daughters doing well in school there (RCMP policy is to move their mounties around so they can never get embedded in the community which makes them assholes but also maybe less prone to corruption).  He answers an ad and meets the single librarian, Cassandra who moved from Vancouver to Sechelt to be near her older mother.  Cassandra has also become friends over time with George, the murderer.

It's a very absorbing and page-turning read, the kind of comfort mystery that readers can't put down and whose characters you grow attached to.  This is a great book to take on the plane and I actually forced myself not to read it at the airport because I knew I would get done too quickly.  I appreciated the locale and descriptions of the geography, though I found that aside from the old hippy fish seller, the characters were not all that quirky and you don't get the sense of some of the benevolent oddness that defined small B.C. coastal towns back in the day.  Maybe they get richer as the series goes on.

I won't seek these out but will grab them when I find them.  I do have one rant about the TV series.  How is it that in the year of our Lord 2024 fucking Canadian television productions still follow this dogma:

"A lot of U.S. media thought it was actually set in Canada, not in the U.S. They didn't actually grasp that this wasn't Canada," Roberts said. "We wanted to make it just a little more generic ... so that it would have the best opportunity internationally to succeed."

Are you kidding me!?  Have you learned absolutely nothing from the success of all those nordic and british crime series?  Or how about Trailer Park Boys or Schitt's Creek?  American viewers do not want watered down generic versions of mysteries they already see every night.  They want to see the unique cultures and perspectives of different places.  The very strength of the L.R. Wright series is that they take place in a uniquely beautiful and culturally interesting place in the world!  Thousands of American tourists now visit the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island every year.  It's just everything I hate about the media decision-makers in this country, the insecure, grovelling to the States, lowest-common-denominator thinking.  This is why the French-Canadians say we anglos have no culture.  We kill it ourselves out of fear and safety.  Just outrageous. Fire everybody.