Counted Among the Dead
A Mystery
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Award-winning author Anne Emery is back with another Collins-Burke team-up
The students at Father Brennan Burke’s choir school have written a two-act play about the Halifax Explosion of 1917. The last thing Burke expects is a series of threats against his school and his students, designed to make sure they never perform act two. Then the body of a young woman, Trudi Ebbett, is found strangled in Halifax. A junior hockey player, a friend of one of the students, is the last person known to have seen her alive and is suspected of the murder. Lawyer Monty Collins, hired to represent him, cannot find anyone with a motive for killing Trudi. But Monty’s daughter Normie, who is a student at the school and one of the authors of the script, joins her dad and Father Burke as they look deeper into the case. And they begin to suspect that the death is somehow linked to the threats against the play and the events of 1917. But how could something that happened so long ago be a motive for murder in the 1990s?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The fascinating 13th installment of Emery's series featuring priest Brennan Burke and defense attorney Monty Collins (after Fenian Street) draws inspiration from the 1917 Halifax explosion. In 1993, Collins's 10-year-old daughter, Normie, writes a two-part play about the explosion—which killed more than 1,700 people when a French cargo ship and a Norwegian military vessel collided in Halifax harbor—for an assignment at the school where Burke works. During her research, Normie discovers the journals of two boys who lived through the disaster; one describes the shady goings-on he observed in the brothel next door to his home. After a performance of the play's first part, Normie promises her audience that part two will unveil "a mystery about that house next door." Soon, she starts receiving threatening letters, prompting Burke and Collins to investigate. When a young woman shows up at the former brothel, asking to look around, then turns up dead the same night, their efforts intensify. Though the novel gets off to a disjointed start, with too many timelines and points of view to juggle, everything eventually comes together, with plenty of nerve-jangling suspense on offer in the narrative's back half. History buffs and mystery fans alike will walk away satisfied.
