Lane Winslow returns to solve another WWII mystery
By Iona Wishaw, Touchwood Editions, 368 pages, $16.95.
KERRY CLARE A Sorrowful Sanctuary is the fifth in Iona Whishaw’s Lane Winslow mystery series, and while there’s no question you should read it — it’s excellent — a dilemma remains: Should you read it now, or wait until you’ve read the previous titles in the series first?
Whishaw launched the series in 2016 with A Killer in King’s Cove, the central character inspired by her mother, who’d also been a British spy during the Second World War. The series takes place in the war’s aftermath, with Lane Winslow arriving in a small village outside Nelson, B.C., in search of a quiet life, but she turns out to have a knack for stumbling on dead bodies. She proves just as adept at solving mysteries, however, and a romance begins to bloom with the dashing Inspector Darling, all of which culminates in a literary appeal hearkening A Sorrowful Sanctuary, back to Dorothy L. Sayers’ Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey mystery books.
Which is not to say that the charm is pure nostalgia, as the novels’ attractive cover designs inspired by vintage Canadian Pacific travel ads might suggest.
While Whishaw delves into history — previous plots involve British Home Children, Doukhobors in Canada and Stalinist purges during the1940s — there is a contemporary bent to her approach, all of it underlined by an unabashed feminism. Brave, bold and brilliant, Lane Winslow is a force to be reckoned with.
In the latest instalment, Lane and her friends discover a dying man floating in a rowboat with a mysterious gunshot wound — and a pin with the logo of Canada’s fascist National Unity Party lying in the sand nearby. Who is the mystery man, and is he connected to a smarmy politician who is tapping into Canadians’ postwar insecurity to use racism and suspicion of immigrants and refugees to his own advantage?
That Nazis continue to hold appeal is baffling to Lane and Inspector Darling alike. “I suppose I’m simply naive,” she explains. “I want all my Nazis parceled up and put on the shelf of history after all our hard work in the war. I didn’t expect to find them here.”
As ever, Lane tries to leave the police work to the police officers but can’t help becoming embroiled in the case, and soon her fellow residents of Kings Cove are caught up as well, which brings us to the reader’s dilemma: Is meeting these characters five books away from their point of origin analogous to walking into the theatre midway through the play? Does one dare to risk it?
That reader would be advised to risk away. Whishaw does an impressive job of filling in her characters’ backstories without giving away spoilers.
And while you could wait forever to read the series from the start (many books, little time, etc.), the taste offered by A Sorrowful Sanctuary of Lane Winslow and her companions pretty much guarantees you won’t be waiting much longer to go back to the beginning and read everything about them.
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