Healthy Wealthy & Dead (Phoebe Fairfax Mystery)
by Suzanne North
from NeWest Press
A sushi chef, an owl with a hat fetish, an antique steam calliope—what does each have to do with murder at a trendy health spa in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies? Join camerawoman Phoebe Fairfax and her roving camera in this nightmare of western hospitality.
Seeing Is Deceiving (A Phoebe Fairfax Mystery)
by Suzanne North
from McClelland & Stewart
Seeing is Deceiving is Suzanne North’s second Phoebe Fairfax mystery, and it more than delivers on the promise of the first. The sardonic Phoebe and Candi Sinclair, her apparently ditzy colleague at the TV program “A Day in the Lifestyle,” are back, this time in New Age territory.
Phoebe and Candi are filming at the Okotoks Psychic Fair when one of the exhibitors, the sleazy Jonathan Webster, collapses. A few hours later he is dead – poisoned (in a rather extreme way) – and the police immediately suspect his common-law wife, Tracy, of murder. The fractured bones and bruises Webster has dealt her over the years give her ample motive. Frightened, Tracy turns to her old friend Candi for help, and Candi is off sleuthing to clear Tracy’s name, dragging Phoebe along reluctantly in her wake.
Phoebe’s filmmaking efforts and her unenthusiastic crusade to prove Tracy’s innocence take her into the fantastic world of fortune-tellers and pet channellers, to the race track, and through the foothills to the icy Sheep River. En route she encounters an ensemble of odd and delightful characters, including Maud Gellman, who’s suing the Queen for a wrong done to her in a past life, Two Bob, a retired but not retiring bookie, and Sadie Nightingale, wilderness gardener and card-reader extraordinaire.
Fast-pased, wickedly funny, and with a twisty ending that will make readers cheer, this second Phoebe Fairfax mystery demonstrates that, sometimes, seeing really is deceiving.
Bones to Pick a Phoebe Fairfax Mystery
by Suzanne North
from McClelland & Stewart
Against her good judgement, Phoebe Fairfax, Canada’s most reluctant sleuth, is once again embroiled in a hilarious mystery, this time involving old bones, overwhelming conceit, unrequited love – and murder. Phoebe is on her way to the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta to interview the great paleoanthropologist Dr. Graham Maxwell at the start of his world tour to exhibit his latest find – ossils that he claims are startling evidence of a whole new hominoid species, one that apparently appreciated and played music.
But not everyone thinks Maxwell is right. When Phoebe finds Maxwell’s dead body in the museum the morning after the exhibition’s launch and the fossils themselves go missing, she realizes she was definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time. As much as she’d like to leave the investigation to the police, the case won’t leave her alone, not until she discovers who hated Maxwell or his theory so passionately he or she was prepared to murder the celebrated scientist.
Also entangled in this murderous comedy are Dr. Adam Woodward, who spends his summers trying to see how far back along the evolutionary path a modern man can go and still survive; Simon Visser, who has toiled in obscurity alongside Maxwell ever since he was caught faking data for his doctoral dissertation; Gillian Collins, Maxwell’s lovestruck assistant; and Stan Darling, Maxwell’s former classmate, now a retired oil geologist and leader of the anti-Darwinist Geologists for Jesus.
Bones to Pick is a laugh-out-loud novel, peopled with some of the most likeable and eccentric characters you’ll ever meet; people thrown together by one man’s fatal ambition and another’s stubborn belief that Darwin was wrong.
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