by Cathy Ace
Touchwood Editions
I'm late coming to this series. The Corpse with the Golden Nose is the second Cait Morgan Mystery and now I want to go back and read the first one, too.
This one combines essentials I appreciate -- a strong female lead character and a memorable setting. Cait Morgan is such a woman. She's a criminal psychologist at the fictitious University of Vancouver who solves crime along with her male sidekick, retired police detective Bud Anderson. They have worked together professionally many times and have now moved onto a personal partnership.
The setting is Kelowna, B.C. in the beautiful Okanagan. I'm a big fan of all things B.C. (having grown up there)and what makes this even more enticing is the fact that the Vancouver couple visits thia wine country in order to determine if a suicide is indeed murder.
Cait has special abilities that aid her in her work as a criminologist. One of those is her astounding memory and the other is a technique called "wakeful dreaming". Her insights are critical to the solving of the mystery -- the first part being, was it suicide? The victim was the part owner of a vineyard and another big shock comes from the fact that she left her half not to her sister and business partner but rather to a vintner from another winery. As the story unfolds, over the period of a weekend featuring a Moveable Feast with some mouthwatering food and wine pairings, the cast of eclectic characters each reveal, if not a direct motive, at least the fact that something is going on in each life.
Cathy Ace has packed her novel with lots of texture, from the scenery to the food descriptions, to character descriptions. Cait is smart, determined and a woman in her late forties who worries about the extra pounds and is sometimes haunted by dreams of her late husband. Just your everyday female sleuth, right? Wrong.
The first book in the series is The Corpse with the Silver Tongue. Any bets on what the third will be called?
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