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Ten years after coming home to her husband unexpectedly and seeing a spectral figure vanish from behind him as she fell down a flight of stairs, Mrs. O’Hara, now the best-known cleaning woman in Sechelt, is involved in an even darker mystery, as each of her client families is touched by murder. Sixteen-year-old Rebecca Granger vanishes from her parents’ home, to reappear as a corpse on her birthday six months later. Andrew Maine’s wife Janet, who addressed her husband’s resistance to the idea of children by getting an abortion, has followed the same path, even to her burial in the same meadow. And hints of still other victims are reaching Staff Sgt. Karl Alberg’s ambitious new sidekick Edwina Henderson. They’d be reaching Alberg, too, if he weren’t so preoccupied with the marriage to his longtime love Cassandra Mitchell—an event celebrated on the very day Rebecca Granger disappeared--and with his sudden powerful urge to resign from the Mounties and hang out his shingle as a private eye in Vancouver. The off-the-rack serial-killer plot would be forgettable in anyone else’s hands. But Wright (Strangers Among Us, 1996, etc.) turns it to magical use by her unexcelled gift of rooting acts of violence in the rhythms of everyday life and banal desires.
