Summer Reads | Book Preview: After You Die

With place names like Peterborough and Fenlon, we could mistake this tight summer read as a Canadian cottage-country tale. It’s not. Author Eva Dolan is an Essex-based writer whose crime fiction follows two detectives working the UK’s Peterborough Hate Crimes Unit. Still, what makes After You Die a prospect for an afternoon read on a Muskoka dock is the book’s potential to terrify, whether it’s set in cottage country or not.

Here’s the scoop, as posted recently by Penguin Random House:

A gas leak in a picturesque Fenlands village leads to the discovery of two bodies — a mother and her severely disabled teenage daughter.

Dawn Prentice was already known to the Peterborough Hate Crimes Unit. The previous summer she had logged a number of calls detailing the harassment she and her severely disabled teenage daughter were undergoing. Now she is dead — stabbed to death whilst Holly Prentice has been left to starve upstairs.

DS Ferreira, only recently back serving on the force after being severely injured in the line of duty, had met with Dawn that summer. Was she negligent in not taking Dawn’s accusations more seriously? Did the murderer even know that Holly was helpless upstairs while her mother bled to death?

Whilst Ferreira battles her demons, determined to prove she’s up to the frontline, DI Zigic is drawn into conflict with an official seemingly resolved to hide the truth about one of his main suspects. Can either officer unpick the truth about mother and daughter, and bring their killer to justice?

$16.99 CDN

www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

Photo: After You Die, Penguin Random House