A literary whodunit set in an unreliable 1962, The Suspension Bridge takes place in a Canadian river city dreaming of fame as it sets about building the world’s biggest bridge. The newly-arrived Sister Harriet navigates a chaotic first year at upscale Saint Reginald’s Academy, where the mysterious disappearance of boarding students complicates her ongoing identity crisis. The sinister bridge is meant to usher in a new era for Bothonville (pronounced Buttonville), but the inner lives of several characters, including Harriet’s, fall victim to its supernatural influence. Part comic allegory and part fairy tale, The Suspension Bridge takes the reader, with dark humour and occasional sympathy, into a midair world of bridges of many sorts, that don’t always hold up as well as they promise.

Anna Dowdall was born in Montreal and, like her protagonist in The Suspension Bridge, moved back to the city of her birth twice. Again like the peripatetic Sister Harriet, she’s lived all over, currently making the Junction neighbourhood of Toronto her home. Occupationally just as restless, she’s been a reporter, a nurse’s aide, a graphic artist, a college lecturer, a planner, a union thug, a translator, a baker, a book conservator, a pilot and a horticultural advisor, as well as other things best forgotten. Raised on fairy tales, she began by writing two young adult fantasy novels. These manuscripts made the long lists for the American Katherine Paterson Prize and the Crime Writers of Canada’s unpublished novel award. After being told by an agent her words were too “big,” she shifted to adult fiction. Her three genre-bending literary mysteries, April on Paris Street (Guernica 2021), The Au Pair (2018) and After the Winter (2017), feature evocative settings and a preoccupation with the lives of women. A lover of prose, she once wrote a poem, which ended up on an electricity pole on Montreal’s rue de la Poésie.

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“Anna Dowdall delivers the shivers. Oh, and if you hear a corpulent slithering sound, that will be Alfred Hitchcock stirring in his grave because he didn’t live long enough to film this quality novel. Yes, it's that good.”
—Alan Bradley, NYT bestselling author.
“At once dark and moody and irreverently cheeky, The Suspension Bridge joins together literary mystery with municipal intrigue and a young nun’s tell-all as she faces her own internal conflicts. Dowdall infuses rich atmosphere with captivating uncertainty and characters undeniably Canadian yet redolent of some other time and place.”
—Anthony Bidulka, author of Going to Beautiful, Crime Writers of Canada 2023 Best Crime Novel, and the Merry Bell trilogy (including 2024's From Sweetgrass Bridge)
“Please welcome a new and entertaining clerical sleuth: Sister Henrietta is intelligent, determined, funny, and not a little perplexed as she investigates some very odd doings in a very odd town determined to be the very model of the very modern year of 1962–– until it all goes pear-shaped. Filled with many twists and turns, The Suspension Bridge is a charming and deliciously convoluted tale served with both dark humour and a lighthearted air.”
—C.C. Benison, author of the Father Christmas mysteries
The Suspension Bridge is an apt title for Anna Dowdall’s new novel. Hanging between faith and doubt, innocence and cynicism, blossoming and immolation, this is a story told mainly through the eyes of a youngish nun, Sister Harriet, who has come to a teaching order at the same time a magnificent bridge is to be built in the town. Through the course of a school year, rival bridge committees need infiltrating, students from the convent’s girls’ school go missing, several fires occur, coffee shops feature beatniks singing ballads and protest songs, and through it all, Harriet needs to find her balance. While not everyone’s choices in life need to be as radical as taking religious vows or running away with the circus, Dowdall creates a continuum from bank to bank of her imaginary river that somehow makes sense for her intriguing characters. Dowdall has found a voice suited to the era while still connected to a more contemporary judgment of the times. Set in a seemingly idyllic area of Canadian small town life, the reader senses the historic tensions of the real world of 1963 just beyond the page, kept back by a levee that might not hold.
—Janice Macdonald, creator of the Randy Craig and Imogene Durant Mysteries