Death Plays With Fire — Gwendolyn Southin

A church on fire, a dead body, a mysterious cloaked figure seen running away, and the finger points to the obviously guilty person-the church organist. It's September 1962, and Maggie Spencer is taking a few weeks holiday in the beautiful Okanagan Valley after a difficult year of sleuthing and family entanglements when she is called on to help exonerate the hapless organist. But when murder and kidnapping follow, Maggie is forced to call in Nat, her partner in Southby and Spencer Investigations, and so begins a case that will take them up and down the valley and off into the hills, involving them with orchardists, migrant apple pickers, tent makers, church members, drug runners and weird recluses. This sixth book in the popular Margaret Spencer Mysteries brings the series to an exciting but very satisfying close. What the critics said about the earlier books in this series: What would you do if you wanted to write an old-fashioned British cozy, but you didn't want to re-create Miss Marple? If you were Gwendolyn Southin, you would invent Margaret Spencer! . . .This is a great getaway book. GLOBE AND MAIL.Margaret Spencer has evolved into a feisty Murder-She-Wrote-type heroine a la Angela Lansbury. BC BOOK WORLD There is something engaging about a middle-aged, middle class wife and mother living out the super sleuth fantasy. You somehow know, as she runs barefoot across the cliff tops and plunges into the ocean to elude evil pursuers, that Maggie has got her feet wet and will survive to sleuth again. TIMES COLONIST.An engaging sleuth reminiscent of more laid-back times. THE NATIONAL POST.