No one likes to be hoodwinked – unless they are puzzling over a mystery novel. It morphs into a mental challenge, a step-by-step guessing game until the big revelation at the end.
St. Albert’s Laurie McLure is the latest fiction crime novelist who has published her debut suspense thriller, Mountain Shadows. It is the first in a three-part series that begins when Nicola Henderson, a victims’ services advocate, discovers she has a stalker.
With her family, she escapes to a remote lodge deep in the Rockies. But in the quaint locale, not everything is as it seems. Mountain Shadows Lodge has few guests, but the first night there’s a campfire, a ghost story, a prank that goes wrong and too much alcohol consumed. The next day one of the guests is missing and Nicola learns a name is scrubbed from the lodge’s official record.
McLure was tight-lipped about the plot, however she mentions one of the major themes is “who helps the helper when the helper needs help? I needed someone like a doctor, a nurse or a police officer who lives in a small town and is involved in everyone’s business,” she said.
McLure, who subscribes to Crime Writers of Canada and Mystery Writers of America, was tossing around the idea of writing a thriller when she was employed at Alberta’s Department of Community Development.
After her retirement from civil service, she travelled around the world. When the world of tourism dried up during COVID, she flushed out ideas that had been percolating in her brain for decades.
“I loved to read mysteries, and I was inspired by a variety of books from Nancy Drew to Louise Penney to Ruth Ware. I even met Ruth Ware at a conference in Iceland. After her talk we sat on the steps of church in Reykjavik. She considers herself a teammate. There is no competition. She was willing to give me a leg up.”
Working through seven drafts, McLure has constructed a scary, action-packed page-turner focusing on the good versus evil format and the message is simple.
“What you do will always catch up with you. Who we care about and how we treat people in the present and the past will always catch up with us. You can run but you can’t hide.”
McLure is doing a reading of Mountain Shadows at Bailey Books on Saturday, Aug. 24 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Bailey Books is at 29B Rowland Crescent.
