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

Passionate environmentalist, old-time hippy Lucky Smith and Chief Constable of Trafalgar, British Columbia Paul Keller are an unlikely couple. Their vacation to the Rocky Mountains is a chance to explore their fledging late-in-life relationship. But trouble interferes when the pair run into Paul's estranged son, Matt.

This chance encounter soon becomes a quagmire of trouble when a frantic Matt calls his father for help. Lucky and Paul rush to his aid to find a body, but no Matt. All signs indicate that Matt—an experienced wilderness adventurer—has escaped into the backcountry. To RCMP Sergeant Eddie Blechta, running is all the proof of guilt he needs.

Lucky's daughter, Constable Molly Smith of the Trafalgar City Police, rushes to offer her mother support. Though she has no intention of meddling in the investigation, when Matt's girlfriend, Tracey, asks for her help, Molly Smith finds herself deep in the case. Can they find Matt and clear his name?

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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