"Delany delivers an outstanding debut novel that explores the good, the bad, and the ugly of family relationships." —Booklist

Rebecca McKenzie, a successful Vancouver businesswoman, returns to tiny Hope River after an absence of 30 years to attend her mother's funeral. Estranged from her father and two older siblings, she'd left a brutal childhood and a psychopathic grandfather behind. She expects her visit to be short. But then she discovers the diaries written by her mother, a British war bride with a young baby who came to Canada to join a husband she scarcely knew, and finds her heart wrung by her mother's story. Meanwhile, a young girl has gone missing, and suspicion falls on Rebecca's handsome, charming brother Jimmy. Before long, violence threatens and Rebecca must put aside some long-held grievances to cut to the heart of the crime.

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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