Speak for the Dead
A Dominion Archives Mystery
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
“A literary joyride.” —Louise Penny, New York Times bestselling author of the Chief Inspector Gamache novels
More than ten years after The Foulest Things, murder and mayhem return to Ottawa in the highly-anticipated next installment of Amy Tector’s acclaimed Dominion Archives Mystery series.
It’s a stormy summer day when Ottawa coroner Dr. Cate Spencer is called to the scene of an alleged suicide. Inside a narrow vault in the Dominion Archives’ nitrate film storage facility—kept separate from the rest of the collection due to its dangerous combustibility—officers pressure Cate to rule the death a suicide. When parts of the scene don’t add up and a deliberately set spark threatens her life, Cate suspects that this death might be a murder.
Cate’s tough façade masks a deep compassion for the victims she examines. Whether she’s looking for answers because of her dedication to justice or to distract herself from anguish over her brother’s recent death, her inquiries plunge her into a world of military secrets, contentious Indigenous protests, and a seventy-year-old mystery with deadly implications. Will Cate manage to pull herself away from her scotch and grief to expose an explosive historic secret and solve a murder the police doubt even exists?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tector's strong sequel to 2022's The Foulest Things opens at Canada's Dominion Archives, where Ontario coroner Cate Spencer has been called to the scene of an apparent suicide. Hanging from a ceiling pipe in a nitrate film storage facility is the body of 23-year-old Molly Johnson, an archives employee. The police are eager for Cate to rule the death a suicide, thus relieving them of the responsibility to investigate, but she's troubled by some anomalies, including the lack of signs that Molly struggled before dying. Beset by doubts about her own objectivity, Cate worries that she wants a murder to probe to avoid dealing with her emotional challenges after the recent death of her physician brother in a plane crash while working for Medical Aid International in the Congo. Indications that foul play, linked to the "biggest land deal in Ottawa history," may have led to Molly's death thicken the plot. Tector smoothly balances her lead's struggles with alcohol in the wake of her brother's death with developments in the well-crafted mystery. Temperance Brennan fans will be pleased.
