Rudderless after betrayal by her former fiancé, Montreal heiress Sally Ryder discovers her deceased mother had a secret life and she has a half-sister. Helena has written to Sally, inviting her to Midwinter, an isolated estate in Quebec. But before they can meet, Helena and her husband die under disturbing circumstances.

Sally decides to visit nearby Waverley for a few days nevertheless, to learn what she can about the sister she never knew. Her first shock is to find that her brother-in-law left everything, including Midwinter, to his beautiful secretary Janine. During a storm, Sally is unexpectedly snowed in with Janine and an assortment of Midwinter guests. It isn't long before Sally becomes entangled with a handsome doctor from Boston in an effort to uncover the truth about her sister's mysterious life, and death.

Meanwhile, the bodies pile up.

Anna Dowdall was born in Montreal and, like her protagonist in The Suspension Bridge, moved back to the city of her birth twice. Again like the peripatetic Sister Harriet, she’s lived all over, currently making the Junction neighbourhood of Toronto her home. Occupationally just as restless, she’s been a reporter, a nurse’s aide, a graphic artist, a college lecturer, a planner, a union thug, a translator, a baker, a book conservator, a pilot and a horticultural advisor, as well as other things best forgotten. Raised on fairy tales, she began by writing two young adult fantasy novels. These manuscripts made the long lists for the American Katherine Paterson Prize and the Crime Writers of Canada’s unpublished novel award. After being told by an agent her words were too “big,” she shifted to adult fiction. Her three genre-bending literary mysteries, April on Paris Street (Guernica 2021), The Au Pair (2018) and After the Winter (2017), feature evocative settings and a preoccupation with the lives of women. A lover of prose, she once wrote a poem, which ended up on an electricity pole on Montreal’s rue de la Poésie.

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