“Interlake haunted by cottage country killer

Manitobans are never more fiendishly evil than when the siblings gather to carve up the family cottage.

The bourgeois elite Borthwick clan owns Hazeldean, the once-finest cottage country mansion in Cullen Village in the Interlake, now in need of a huge reno, though on lakefront land that’s worth plenty.

Father the patriarch is dead, mother is in a nursing home for people with dementia and four siblings are flocking in from all over, each plotting to get way more than their piece of the pie and do with the cottage what they alone want.

Oops — make that three siblings.

RCMP Sgt. Roxanne Calloway had decided the quiet cottage country detachment was just the thing for a single mother traumatized by nearly getting killed on the job in one of Raye Anderson’s previous mysteries.

Your book club will chime in with “I told you so, Sarge.”

Calloway should have known four books into the very entertaining series by Gimli author Raye Anderson that she’d be safer in downtown Detroit at midnight than in the blood-soaked beaches and corpse-filled bucolic woods of the Interlake.

You really think that body hanging off the edge of the pier is going to still be presumed a suicide by the end of the book? Or that Calloway is looking at the only corpse there’ll be by the end of the July 1 weekend?

The sibling suspects aren’t enough — there are spouses and partners and children and nosey aunts galore who need sleuthing, not to mention neighbours who’d be affected by anything changing at Hazeldean and villagers who might take heritage preservation into heinous territory.

One Borthwick is married to a Conservative MP for a south Winnipeg riding. Bit of a bounder, as Anderson writes him, and carrying a lot of clout for someone in opposition. He’s also good friends with the premier — there are hints that she’d poke her government’s nose into the police and Crown where the Borthwick family’s reputation is at stake.

Keep in mind that this is, you know, fiction.

It goes without saying that Sing A Song of Summer gets awkward quickly for Calloway.

She’s left behind her dangerous days with the Major Crimes Unit, so up drives her former protégé Izzy McBain, who’s now Calloway’s equal in rank and is now in charge of homicides (note the plural) — Izzy’s the boss on this case.

Further, Izzy broke up with Mountie Matt, who’s now a lawyer and (who could have seen this coming?) living with Roxanne and her young son. The young son has become pals with the stepson of one of the Borthwicks, which should raise all kinds of red flags for Calloway. Should.

And Calloway is pregnant, which she has yet to mention to Matt.

Oh dear.

Anderson has renamed everything north of Winnipeg and it’s a good hunch that she’s fiddled with some geography. There’s little use in trying to figure which is Gimli or Hecla — Cullen Village and Fiskar Bay and posh Bulrush Island at the end of a causeway could be fictional and they don’t slot easily into a map of Manitoba.

This is Anderson’s fourth book about the mayhem and carnage striking terror into the hearts of all who dare venture into the Interlake and they keep getting better. Still too short, but darned good.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin never spent much time in the Interlake outside of work — the Whiteshell had far fewer criminal masterminds… at least, as far as anyone knows.”

— Nick Martin Winnipeg Free Press

Read the full review at Winnipeg Free Press