• Age: 8 to 18
• Grade: 3 to 12

Middle-aged Jane Barken discovers a lump in her left breast, the second in five years. She is depressed, her marriage is falling apart, and her singing career is faltering. Recuperating at her Willow Island cottage after a lumpectomy, she decides to embark on a canoe trip around the island. She discovers a section of the island no one has ever seen, and what she finds there is horrifying.

Carol Dahlstrom is a recently retired book editor. She worked for many years in the Manitoba book-publishing industry, having started out at Turnstone Press in the late 1970s, just after its inception. She moved on to the University of Manitoba Press and then to Mosaic: A Journal for the International Study of Literature and has since worked as a free-lance book editor. She has also recently retired from riding dressage and working as a singer of early music -- horses and music being two of her great passions. She spends her time now trying to keep fit, reading, writing, playing her beautiful inherited grand piano, making quilts, and doing her best in summer to keep the weeds in her garden at bay. She lives with her three cats on Willow Island, on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, near Gimli, Manitoba. The Three-Legged Fox is her first novel.

Carol Dahlstrom's profile page

"The Three-Legged Fox is at once a mystery and a keen study in contrast. Behind a continually shifting façade of adult civility, Dahlstrom’s characters revel in infidelity, betrayal, and misguided passions, resulting in trauma, pain, and ultimately murder. A finely-woven story, albeit one where the human threads are far more frayed than anyone realizes." - Brent van Staalduinen, author of Unthinkable and Boy