It’s not all fun and games for Ashley Smeeton, in her mid-twenties and trying to run a private investigation agency in Montreal despite a temporary cash flow problem. She’s as surprised as anyone when she agrees to take a summer au pair job in the scenic Laurentian Mountains.

Montreal might be enduring a heat wave, but at Columbine Lodge, occupied by a few generations of immensely wealthy Sampsons, things are heating up as well. Between the mystery that surrounds four-year-old Meade and her complicated mother Layla, and the lingering mood of past suffering in the old lodge, Ashley quickly becomes intrigued. The uneasy atmosphere of her idyllic surroundings intensifies when people unexpectedly begin to die.

With a capricious little girl in her charge, Ashley’s got her work cut out for her...but the urge to uncover the dark secrets of Columbine Lodge proves irresistible.

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 These manuscripts made the long lists for the American Katherine Paterson Prize and the Crime Writers of Canada’s unpublished novel award.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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