It's a hot dry summer and a pall of smoke from the forest fires drifts over the lakeshore. Still, tourists and cottagers flock to Cullen Village, including the Borthwicks, who own Hazeldean, a treasured 100-year-old heritage cottage. Family matriarch Lois Borthwick, in a nearby care home, no longer recognizes any of her four children, each of whom has a decidedly different plan for the old place. The eldest, Donna, a successful local realtor married to a well-known MP, wants to tear it down and build anew. When Donna's lifeless body is found hanged from a pier, the death is ruled a suicide. Case closed. Or is it?

After a life-threatening incident with the Major Crimes Unit, Sergeant Roxanne Calloway has decided to put family before ambition and seek a quieter, safer life with her young son. She now runs the local RCMP detachment in the heart of cottage country, and protocol dictates that she has no reason to participate in the Borthwick investigation, which is being led by her former protegee, Izzy McBain. As more of the unlucky Borthwick clan succumb to foul play, however, Roxanne cannot help but be drawn in.

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.

Raye Anderson's profile page