Lightning Strikes the Silence
A Lane Winslow Mystery
- Publisher
- TouchWood Editions
- Initial publish date
- May 2024
- Category
- Amateur Sleuth, Historical, Women Sleuths, Cozy
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781771514323
- Publish Date
- May 2024
- List Price
- $21.95
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781771514330
- Publish Date
- May 2024
- List Price
- $8.99
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Description
Beginning with a bang, the latest mystery in the series Publishers Weekly calls “highly entertaining” is a study in bygone promises and lingering prejudice.
A warm June afternoon in King’s Cove is interrupted by an explosion. Following the sound, Lane goes to investigate. Up a steep path she discovers a secluded cabin and, hiding nearby, a young Japanese girl injured and mute, but very much alive.
At the Nelson Police Station, Inspector Darling and Sergeant Ames, following up on a report of a nighttime heist at the local jeweller’s, discover the jeweller himself dead in his office, apparently bludgeoned, and a live wire hanging off the back of the building.
As Lane attempts to speed the search for the girl’s family with her own lines of inquiry, Darling and his team dig deeper into a local connection between the jeweller and a fellow businessman that leads across the pond to Cornwall and north to a mining interest on the McKenzie River. Away at her police course in Vancouver, Sergeant Terrell’s favourite (former) waitress April McAvity is drawn into the case when Darling asks for her help with finding possible relatives in the city for Lane’s young charge.
Meanwhile offices are being ransacked and someone is following Lane. Through the alleyways of Nelson onto the country roads and woods trails of King’s Cove, the latest Winslow mystery is a study in bygone promises and lingering prejudice.
About the author
Iona Whishaw was born in British Columbia. After living her early years in the Kootenays, she spent her formative years living and learning in Mexico, Nicaragua, and the US. She travelled extensively for pleasure and education before settling in the Vancouver area. Throughout her roles as youth worker, social worker, teacher, and award-winning high school principal, her love of writing remained consistent, and compelled her to obtain her master’s in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. Iona has published short fiction, poetry, poetry translation, and one children’s book, Henry and the Cow Problem. A Killer in King’s Cove was her first adult novel. Her heroine, Lane Winslow, was inspired by Iona’s mother who, like her father before her, was a wartime spy. Visit ionawhishaw.com to find out more.
Excerpt: Lightning Strikes the Silence: A Lane Winslow Mystery (by (author) Iona Whishaw)
PROLOGUE
May 1905
“Look what you’ve done, you town-bred pig!”
He barely had time to form an answer when he was pushed hard. In a fury he scrambled up off the ground and lunged at his attacker’s feet knocking him over so that his head fell hard on the rocks.
“Say that again!” But the boy didn’t move.
“Say it again!” he yelled, He swiping at the boy to make him move, and then struck him hard. “Say it!” he was screaming now, reaching back again with his fist.
He didn’t hear anything until he felt himself being lifted off the ground, someone far outside the deafening thrumming inside his own head roaring, “Stop! For God’s sake, stop!”
CHAPTER ONE
June 11, 1948
The explosion was deep and resonant, and so unfamiliar that the residents of King’s Cove who were outside, which was most of them on a beautiful June day, looked upward thinking it was odd to have thunder out of so clear a blue sky.
Lane Winslow, reading under the weeping willow, frowned, closed her book, and struggled up from her folding canvas chair. Where had the boom come from? Having dismissed the idea that it was thunder, she turned her mind to her neighbours. Had an explosion accidentally ignited in someone’s coal cellar? It seemed to be coming from up the mountain a little south of her. The Hughes family lived up there!
She dropped her book and ran into the house to seize the car keys off the hook by the inside of the door, jumped into her little Austin, backed it hurriedly onto the road, and then swung it around and made for the fork that led on up the hill toward the Hughes house. She turned left and bumped as quickly as she could down the rutted road that ran alongside their fenced field, her tires sinking into the muddy pools still left from the torrential rain of the night before. She saw their two milking cows cowering under a tree, and she tried to go faster, conscious of the deep ruts causing the centre hump to scrape the bottom of her car. In the driveway, she stopped and gazed around her.
Not a bloom out of place. The magnificent flower borders maintained by the grande dame of the family, old Gladys Hughes, flowed around the fruit trees, and the curved patches of lawn were the luminous green of early summer. Drops of moisture on the plants dazzled in the mid-morning sun. No smoke, no fire. Just a gentle mist as the sun evaporated the remains of the night’s rain. But the two spaniels were definitely kicking up a fuss. She saw what she had missed initially. At the edge of the apple orchard, all three Hughes women were standing with their hands shielding their eyes looking west up the mountain. Then Mabel, the elder of the two “girls,” both in their fifties, leaned over and tried to hush the hysterically barking dogs.
Lane got out of the car and hurried along the final bit of grassy drive to where they were standing.
“You heard it too,” Gwen, the younger daughter said, turning to greet Lane. “The dogs have gone mad.”
“I thought it came from here,” Lane said. She too gazed in the direction of the hill above the orchard where they had been looking.
“Good of you to come,” Gladys said, glancing at her. “All tip-top here. It came from up there somewhere.” She pointed where the thickly treed mountainside climbed steeply above King’s Cove. “I thought it might be those Sons of whatever they are, those Freedomites blowing things up again, but there’s nothing up there to blow up. It’s just bush. Do you think some hound is blasting up there looking for silver? That would be the bloody limit!”
“Language, mother,” Mabel said, then pointed up the hill, “Is that smoke?”
The dogs took up their chorus again. “It is, I think,” Lane confirmed. “I wonder if anyone is up there and been hurt?”
“If it sets the forest alight, we’re all for it,” Gladys said grimly. King’s Cove had lived through the fire of 1919, which had destroyed several houses and most of the orchards in the north part of the settlement. “We’d best telephone the authorities.” She started back to the house.
“How far up do you think that is?” asked Lane.
Gwen considered. “It’s hard to tell from here. We sometimes hike up that way with the dogs and it’s a good forty minutes where we go, but that smoke is much farther still. There’s a rocky outcrop with a marvellous view of this arm of the lake and the mountains. There’s not really a proper trail there, though.”
“Higher up than forty minutes?” Lane was becoming more uneasy. The smoke was rising blackly above the thick blanket of trees and was rolling over on itself. “I think I’d better go up and make sure there’s nobody there.”
“Mother can do the phoning. We’ll come with you. Let me run and get my first aid kit,” Mabel said. “I know the way. I still keep the kit in good nick since the war, though it won’t do much if someone is badly burned.”
Lane waited impatiently, keeping an eye on whether the smoke patch was getting larger. Finally, Gwen and Mabel came, Gwen carrying a thermos and Mabel a shoulder bag.
“The damn water is patchy again. All I got was a blast of air when I turned on the tap. That’s why it took so long. It’s been a bit dodgy for ages, but it’s just got really bad. I’ve got to get Harris to go check the lines. There must be a hole or air pockets in the pipe somewhere. Right, off we go.”
With that Mabel strode off, leading the way, the dogs bounding around her, excited about the adventure.
Editorial Reviews
Praise for the Lane Winslow Mysteries
A Match Made for Murder (#7) is winner of the 2021 Bony Blithe Light Mystery Award
"The ‘find of the year’, Iona Whishaw’s Lane Winslow series is a real treat. Set after WWII, Lane has left England for Canada . . . settling in the small village of King’s Cove. With a quaint cast of characters and the feel of Louise Penny’s Three Pines, the independence and quick wit of Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher and the intelligence of Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs, this mystery series has it all!" —Murder by the Book, Texas
"Highly entertaining . . . fans and newcomers alike will find lots to love." —Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Relentlessly exciting from start to finish." —Kirkus Reviews
"Whishaw deftly intertwines plot and psychology, giving readers insight not only into Lane's crime-solving strategies, but the perspectives and lives of her neighbors. The series also follows Lane's inner journey, from complicated family history to postwar trauma to the beginning of new love. Well plotted and laced with dry wit, Lane's adventures are entirely satisfying summer reading." —Shelf Awareness
"Iona Whishaw is a writer to watch." —Globe and Mail
"There’s no question you should read it—it’s excellent." —Toronto Star
"Stellar . . . " —Eliza Knight, USA Today bestselling author of Starring Adele Astaire
"What a delight! Lane and Darling are the most adorable couple I’ve met in a long time, and Whishaw’s clever insights into their post-WWII lives are crafted with such charming finesse that readers will fall in love as I did." —Genevieve Graham, #1 USA Today bestselling author of Bluebird
"Whishaw is a master of the historical mystery." —Sam Wiebe, award-winning author of Sunset and Jericho and Hell and Gone
“An engaging, superbly crafted page turner of a mystery.” —Alan Hlad, international and USA Today bestselling author of The Long Flight Home
“Iona Whishaw’s writing is worthy of taking its place alongside the works of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers. . . deftly crafted and briskly paced.” —Fiona Valpy, author of The Dressmaker’s Gift
"Another fantastic entry in the unique and compelling Lane Winslow series!" —Anna Lee Huber, author of the Lady Darby Mysteries
“I absolutely love the modern sensibility of these novels, of their feminism, sense of justice, their anti-racism, their progressiveness, which somehow never seems out of place in a tiny BC hamlet in 1948. . . But it’s never preachy or pedantic, and Whishaw continues to use her murder mysteries to explore the limitations on women’s lives and freedom that were contemporary to the period, and which are not yet so far away in the rear view mirror.” —Kerry Clare, author of Mitzi Bytes and Waiting for a Star to Fall
"Complex, suspenseful, and deeply felt, this is a smart series for the ages." —Francine Mathews, author of the Nantucket Mysteries
"Exquisitely written, psychologically deft." —Linda Svendsen, author of Sussex Drive
"Iona Whishaw has again raised the bar . . . This is seriously good storytelling." —Don Graves, Canadian Mystery Reviews
"In the vein of Louise Penny . . . a compelling series that combines a cozy setting, spy intrigue storylines, and police procedural elements—not an easy task, but one that Whishaw pulls off." —Reviewing the Evidence
"The setting is fresh and the cast endearing." —CrimeReads
"An enthralling mystery." —Historical Novel Society
"This series . . . continues to get better and better." —Reviewing the Evidence
"A simply riveting read by a master of the genre." —Wisconsin Bookwatch
"A series that’s guaranteed to please." —Mercer Island Books, Washington
"Full of history, mystery, and a glorious BC setting . . . a wonderful series." —Sleuth of Baker Street, Ontario
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