This Sister Harriet murder mystery will linger like a warm beer. Set in 1962 and 1963, this tale starts and ends on a bridge, literally and metaphorically. With many characters, including Sister Harriet, on a journey of self-discovery and balanced above and below murky waters, we are on a wild ride as she takes on a teaching role at Saint Reginald’s Academy in a Canadian city.
Throughout the tale it is revealed that Harriet is suspended in her past, travelling home and to her past in hopes of finding her future and herself. Working in an all-girls school, tensions and hormones run feverishly high, especially with two male teachers in their midst.
A tale of icy figure-eights and fires, this story highlights the power of all earthly and emotional elements we are all familiar with. When one of the famous “L’s” goes missing, secrets and hide-outs are slowly revealed. Like a pot of tea being steeped to perfection, the story simmers and boils over when another girl from the school goes missing.
But, like tea and the proverbial idea of a watched pot never boils, this mystery is closely watched by many, each adding a flavour and layer of intrigue to the mystique. As the students work together to build their own bridges, and the councils and businesses actually build a bridge promising the community good fortune and rebirth, each character goes through their own rebuilding.
With faith and famine, feast and family, always expect suspense, comedic relief and duplicitous factors. This whodunit did all of that and more, and teaches the reader that a watched pot does, in fact, eventually boil under pressure.
Read an excerpt from The Suspension Bridge here!
Anna Dowdall was born in Montreal and, like her protagonist in
The Suspension Bridge, moved back to the city of her birth twice. Again like the peripatetic Sister Harriet, she’s lived all over, currently making the Junction neighbourhood of Toronto her home. Occupationally just as restless, she’s been a reporter, a nurse’s aide, a graphic artist, a college lecturer, a planner, a union thug, a translator, a baker, a book conservator, a pilot and a horticultural advisor, as well as other things best forgotten. Raised on fairy tales, she began by writing two young adult fantasy novels. These manuscripts made the long lists for the American Katherine Paterson Prize and the Crime Writers of Canada’s unpublished novel award. After being told by an agent her words were too “big,” she shifted to adult fiction. Her three genre-bending literary mysteries, April on Paris Street (Guernica 2021), The Au Pair (2018) and After the Winter (2017), feature evocative settings and a preoccupation with the lives of women. A lover of prose, she once wrote a poem, which ended up on an electricity pole on Montreal’s rue de la Poésie.
Publisher: Radiant Press (October 15, 2024)
Paperback 5.5″ x 8.5″ | 282 pages
ISBN: 9781998926121
I am a struggling artist, a challenging and challenged mother who always thinks she is failing, an emerging freelance writer and reporter, an author with my name on several books crossing genres and always hoping to find more readers who enjoy them.
I am also a successful artist, a wonderful and thriving mother of one, a reacher towards both people and dreams despite all of the turned backs and obstacles in my way. I am a thriving freelance writer and reporter, an author loved by enough readers to make it worthwhile and a discombobulated conundrum who loves to hear new music, tell new tales and meet new authors. And I’m doing something I always dreamed of doing – reviewing books to support others as well as myself and my family.
- Sarah Butlandhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/sarah-butland/
- Sarah Butlandhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/sarah-butland/
- Sarah Butlandhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/sarah-butland/
- Sarah Butlandhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/sarah-butland/
- Sarah Butlandhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/sarah-butland/
- Sarah Butlandhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/sarah-butland/
