2019 recipient of the Derrick Murdoch award from the Crime Writers of Canada

Trouble is brewing in the small, bucolic mountain town of Trafalgar, British Columbia. An American who came to Trafalgar as a Vietnam War draft dodger has left land and money to the town. But there's a catch. The money must be used to build a garden to honor draft dodgers. This bequest has torn the close-knit, peaceful town apart. Then the body of a leading garden opponent is found in an alley, dead from a single blow to the head.

Constable Molly Smith is assigned to assist veteran Detective Sergeant John Winters in the investigation. But Winters doesn't want the help of the enthusiastic rookie and suspects that he's been assigned Smith for political reasons: her mother, a life-long activist, is the leader of the group arguing for the park.

Egged on by a muck-raking TV personality, outside agitators from both sides are soon streaming into Trafalgar. In the meantime, Smith and Winters search through small-town secrets for a killer.

Vicki Delany began her writing career as a Sunday writer: a single mother of three high-spirited daughters with a full-time job as a computer programmer. The years passed, as they tend to do, and the three daughters, somewhat hesitantly, flew the coop, leaving Vicki more time to devote to her writing. She was able to write three novels of suspense, set in Ontario, two of which, Scare the Light Away and Burden of Memory, were published to critical acclaim by Poisoned Pen Press of Scottsdale, Arizona. In 2007, In the Shadow of the Glacier, the first book in a police procedural series set in the British Columbia Interior was published. Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Vicki was raised mostly in Ontario. Vicki majored in modern history at Carleton, her interest more in the lives of ordinary women and men and the circumstances of their times than ‘big men’ and their wars. It was on a canoeing trip in Algonquin Park that Vicki, realizing that she was doing for fun what people in the past would have considered a hardship, told her trip mates stories about the incredible difficulties people endured in their attempts to get to the Klondike in search of gold, and the idea for a series of Klondike Gold Rush mysteries was set.

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