Acts of Murder

Canadian sergeant Karl Alberg investigates a string of murders in a small town that began on the day of his wedding to longtime love Cassandra Mitchell

Wright's books about small-town Canadian policeman Karl Alberg have been praised for their precise prose and meticulous attention to detail. Both qualities are abundant in her latest (after Strangers Among Us, 1996), as Staff Sergeant Alberg of the RMP prepares to marry his longtime ladyfriend, Cassandra Mitchell, while a devious killerAunknown to Alberg but introduced early to the readerAis busy killing off various residents of the town of Sechelt, B.C. Alberg himself is still an arresting mixture of reticence and ambition, and Wright never lets his relationship with the shrewd and sensual librarian Mitchell become predictable, even on their wedding day. A new addition to the cop shopAa tall, blonde, 35-year-old unmarried sergeant named Edwina HendersonAhas a mysterious personal life and lots of promise (both as a cop and as a character). And the person responsible for knocking off a string of men, women and even teenage children because of some perceived moral flaws is a frighteningly believable creation. Nothing in the telling is too hurried as Wright, much like Alberg, goes about her business with a reserved but wholly genuine passion.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ten years after coming home to her husband unexpectedly and seeing a spectral figure vanish from behind him as she fell down a flight of stairs, Mrs. O'Hara, now the best-known cleaning woman in Sechelt, is involved in an even darker mystery, as each of her client families is touched by murder. Sixteen-year-old Rebecca Granger vanishes from her parents' home, to reappear as a corpse on her birthday six months later. Andrew Maine's wife Janet, who addressed her husband's resistance to the idea of children by getting an abortion, has followed the same path, even to her burial in the same meadow. And hints of still other victims are reaching Staff Sgt. Karl Alberg's ambitious new sidekick Edwina Henderson. They'd be reaching Alberg, too, if he weren't so preoccupied with the marriage to his longtime love Cassandra Mitchellan event celebrated on the very day Rebecca Granger disappeared--and with his sudden powerful urge to resign from the Mounties and hang out his shingle as a private eye in Vancouver. The off-the-rack serial-killer plot would be forgettable in anyone else's hands. But Wright (Strangers Among Us, 1996, etc.) turns it to magical use by her unexcelled gift of rooting acts of violence in the rhythms of everyday life and banal desires. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.