Book description
Elaine Benson, a successful novelist who jettisoned her career over an
unreliable screenwriter, is now divorced, broke, and come to a
“primitive, untamed northern forest” on Lake Muskoka to interview for a
job. Elderly Miss Moira Madison of the fabulously rich Canadian Madisons
wishes to write her memoirs. Miss Madison isn't interested in a
bestseller. She wants to leave a record of her life, especially of her
years with the Canadian Army Nursing Sisters of World War II. Her
service in the British and then European theater was filled with
triumphs and bitter losses and forever shaped her life. Can Elaine tell
her story working with decades of old documents? Settling into the
family “cottage” and what remains of a lifestyle long gone, Elaine
rediscovers her love of researching the past. But somehow her
project-she soon discovers the first writer Miss Madison hired drowned
in the Lake-stirs someone to murder…. After a messy divorce, Elaine
Benson thinks that taking a job helping wealthy Canadian matriarch Moira
Madison write her memoirs might be just the thing to get her nonfiction
writing career back on track. Unfortunately, she didn't bargain for
Moira's contentious extended family--three generations of relatives full
of opinions and resentments about Moira's project and about one another.
The contemporary family story, viewed through Elaine's outsider
perspective, alternates with Moira's disjointed recollections of years
as a nurse in Europe during World War II, where she meets the love of
her life and learns a secret about her beloved brother that she guards
long after his death. Although Moira and her household are distinctive,
it's difficult to keep some of the numerous other supporting characters
straight, and hints of mystery and the supernatural (Is there a ghost,
or isn't there?) never expand into real suspense. Even so, readers who
favor leisurely puzzles steeped in family dynamics and flavored with
descriptions of beautiful scenery may find this just what they're
looking for. Having taken early retirement from her job as a systems
analyst in the high-pressure financial world, Vicki Delany is settling
down to the rural life in bucolic Prince Edward County, Ontario where
she rarely wears a watch.
