A False and Fatal Claim

Lane Winslow struggles to tell friend from foe in a captivating new mystery from the series Publishers Weekly calls “highly entertaining.”

Lane Winslow is known in her idyllic British Columbia laketown of King's Cove for a bad habit of finding dead bodies. This time, all she’s found is a suspiciously well-made hat abandoned in the brush, but she’s certain there’s a mystery afoot.

While Lane is overtaken by the urge to snoop around for clues, her husband, Inspector Darling, and his team at the Nelson Police Station find their straightforward case of a stolen boat suddenly complicated when a fourteen-year-old boy is reported missing from the local school. When the search for the boy, the hat’s mysterious owner, and the boat lead them to the sudden disappearances of the local café cook, a visiting wealthy investor, and seventy thousand dollars in cash, the case quickly turns into a snarled tangle of missing people and scant, circumstantial evidence.

Desperate to keep a vulnerable and possibly violent young boy safe, Lane recruits the neighbours as Darling, Ames, Terrell, and April scour the local towns and wildernesses for answers—all while Ames struggles to focus through wedding jitters, and April and Terrell chafe under the questionable advice of meddlesome old “friends.” At first, the daily dramas of King’s Cove unfold uninterrupted around the simmering questions at the heart of this far-reaching mystery, but as the case reveals its roots in both the glitzy high society and criminal underground of 1920s Toronto, it soon becomes clear all hands will be needed on deck to get everyone to the coming wedding alive in one piece.