Sometimes the smallest towns have the darkest secrets.
Siblings Wendy and Jason Wyatt-Yarmouth and their friends are in British Columbia, enjoying a two-week vacation. Tragedy strikes the group of privileged students when two of them crash through the ice into the frozen river.
It’s Christmas Eve and the snowstorm of the decade has settled over the peaceful Canadian mountain town of Trafalgar, British Columbia. Constables Smith and Evans have a busy shift, attending fender-benders, tumbling pedestrians, and Christmas-tree fires. At the stroke of midnight, they arrive at the scene of a car accident: a vehicle has gone off the snowy road into the icy river. It seems to be an accident. But when the autopsy reveals a shocking secret, Constable Molly Smith and Sergeant John Winters are plunged into the world of sexual predators, recreational drugs, privilege, and high living.
Meanwhile, Charlie Bassing is out of jail and looking for revenge, a handsome Mountie is giving Molly the eye, and her mother, Lucky, is cheerfully interfering in the investigation.

‘Winter Of Secrets‘ was a pleasant surprise. I picked it up because it’s a murder mystery set in a mountain village in British Columbia during a Christmas Eve snowstorm. I knew it was the third book in a series, but I wanted a Christmas-themed book, so I dived straight in. 

It turned out to be an engaging police procedural with a strong portrayal of a small Canadian mountain town in winter. I’d expected a cosy mystery, similar to Vicki Delaney’s  Sherlock Holmes Bookshop mysteries, but this was quite different. It was much more firmly grounded in reality. It was a sensible police investigation rather than a fanciful story about an amateur sleuth. 

The mystery around the deaths at the heart of the story was a good one, but what I liked most about it was that the people involved felt real.. I got a strong sense of the young police officer being part of the community that she’s policing. She grew up there, and she knows everyone.  She was christened Moonshine by her hippie parents (her poor brother got landed with Samwise), but now calls herself Molly because Moonshine isn’t a serious enough name for a police officer. That the older residents and some of the people she went to school with still call her Moonhine or Moon isn’t something she can control. 

Although this was the third book in the Constable Molly Smith series, I had no difficulty following the plot. There’s clearly a core group of characters who appear in each novel, and much of the focus was on the events in their lives. I liked that the group wasn’t limited to the police force and that it covered people of all ages. It evoked the sense of layered relationships that you get in small towns when some of the older adults have known the younger adults since they were children. I also liked that the detective in the story is from the big bad city, and so has to have some of the history and the more complicated relationships explained to him. 

Part of the action takes place on the local ski slopes. It was interesting to see the mountain and the tourists through Molly’s eyes. She’s a local who knows the mountains well, and she’s an expert skier who relishes the black runs and who knows the people who make all the tourist services work.

I think this series may become a comfort read for me. There are eight books in the series. I’ve decided to go forward rather than back.

I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Carrington MacDuffie. I enjoyed listening to her. She’s American but, as far as I can tell, she manages a reasonable range of Canadian accents. 

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Vicki Delany is one of Canada’s most prolific and varied crime writers and a national bestseller in the U.S. She has written more than fifty books: clever cozies to Gothic thrillers to gritty police procedurals, to historical fiction and novellas for adult literacy. She is currently writing four cozy mystery series: the Tea by the Sea mysteries, the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series, the Catskill Resort mysteries and the Lighthouse Library series (as Eva Gates).
Vicki is a past president of the Crime Writers of Canada and co-founder and organizer of the Women Killing It Crime Writing Festival. Her work has been nominated for the Derringer, the Bony Blithe, the Ontario Library Association Golden Oak, and the Arthur Ellis Awards. Vicki is the recipient of the 2019 Derrick Murdoch Award for contributions to Canadian crime writing. She lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.