Murder, she writes again

The action has moved from Braeside to Ireland but Agnes Carroll is still just as keen a sleuth on the scene of mischief and dastardly doings. The heroine of Patricia Trudeau’s mystery series is back in action for her sixth book, a full 12 years after her premiere in Bodies on Belmont Drive.

In Dead Reckoning in Dublin, Carroll starts off the story being asked to write a play for a university lecturer at Trinity College. But she has a knack for getting in trouble or at least finding it, just as the 84-year-old Trudeau has always written her. Trudeau lives in St. Albert.

“She gets involved in trying to solve a crime,” the author conceded, referring to how her protagonist soon finds herself trying to solve a fatal shooting at the campus. “She witnesses the shootings or at least she witnesses the man falling down.”

Much like Jessica Fletcher, the character portrayed by Angela Lansbury in the Murder, She Wrote TV series, Carroll has an almost supernatural ability to be in the right place at the wrong time. So much so, in fact, that the police sometimes consider her as a suspect.

Also like Fletcher, the lady detective has full powers of deduction and observation.

“She gets interviewed by the police. Being so nosy and everything, she interferes with the police investigation,” Trudeau laughed. “In the meantime, she has to write this play.”

“Whether she’s going to get the play finished in her time there or not is one problem, and whether she can enlighten the police and they’ll accept what she says is another problem, because they’re not making much headway with the crime.”

Trudeau said that she always wanted to be a successful author, despite her prodigious catalogue of paintings that she has produced as an artist. Still, it comes as a bit of a surprise to her that she is now trumpeting the sixth book with the same main character. Sometimes inspiration comes from the weirdest places.

“When I wrote the first one, I wasn’t really intending to do a series. The second one, I got an idea because I lost a hubcap. I went to this junkyard to see if I could replace it and I couldn’t find one to match it. I thought that maybe that would make another story for Agnes: she could go looking for a hubcap and she finds body parts in the car body.”

With her sense of humour and her endless source of curiosity and wonder, it seems unlikely that this will be the last that we have seen of either Trudeau or Carroll.

Dead Reckoning in Dublin is available through the publisher’s online bookstore at www.moosehidebooks.com. That’s where you can find all of the Agnes Carroll series as either paperback or eBooks.