Opening night of the season at Winnipeg’s Prairie Theatre Centre is a glittering event on the city's arts calendar, and this October, there is real drama happening offstage. Gerald Blaise, the company's well-loved Artistic Director has failed to show up. Gerald's car is found the following day, north of the city, when a couple of dogs take a keen interest in the bloody contents of the trunk. Since Gerald's remains have been discovered outside the city limits, Sergeant Roxanne Calloway of the RCMP finds herself investigating the death.

PTC's next play up is to be Shakespeare's Macbeth, an unlucky play according to theatrical tradition. That rings true, for the staff, cast and crew as well as Roxanne. When a second body is found, this time in a city park, Roxanne finds herself having to work alongside the cynical Detective Sergeant Cooper Jenkins of the Winnipeg's Police Services.

Theatre is a different world with its own jargon, where fact and fiction merge, lies are delivered as truth, and where people with active imaginations conjure up convincing stories. Who is Roxanne supposed to believe.

Raye Anderson is a Scots Canadian who spent many years running theatre schools and presenting creative arts programmes for arts organizations, notably at the Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg. She now calls Manitoba's Interlake home, where she is part of a thriving arts community. She has published four books in the Roxanne Calloway Mystery series: And We Shall Have Snow (shortlisted for the 2021 CWC Best Crime First Novel and the 2021 WILLA Literary Award for Original Softcover Fiction), And Then Is Heard No More, Down Came the Rain, and Sing a Song of Summer as well as her new mystery book The Dead Shall Inherit. Her work has taken her across Canada, from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast, and as far north as Churchill and Yellowknife, as well as to the West Indies and her native Scotland.

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