Bøger af Suzanne North

Bones to Pick finds Calgary television photographer Phoebe Fairfax at Alberta's Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology taping the black-tie opening of a display of important hominid fossils discovered on a recent African dig by world-renowned paleoanthropologist Graham Maxwell. Thanks to his inflated ego and dubious honesty, Maxwell has made many enemies over the forty years since his graduation from the University of Alberta. When Phoebe discovers the famous scientist dead, his skull bashed in by a fossil dinosaur egg and his priceless fossils missing, there is no shortage of suspects, some with grudges nurtured over forty years. Embroiled with Phoebe in this murderous comedy are an elderly professor who spends his summers living an experiment in "de-evolving"; Maxwell's assistant who for years has played second fiddle to a man he considers second-rate; Maxwell's young, love struck assistant, the latest in a long series, who realizes she is soon to pass her "best-before" date; and a retired oil geologist now heading an anti-evolution protest group, the Geologists For Jesus. As much social comedy as mystery, Bones to Pick plays out its tale of past sins and present murder against the stark beauty of the Alberta badlands.

A photographer for a local television station, Phoebe Fairfax is on assignment at The Ranch, an exclusive health spa in the Rocky Mountain foothills an hour's drive from Calgary. Life at the luxury spa is thrown into disarray when the executive manager is found murdered with a sushi knife through his heart. Suspects abound. For starters, there's the rotund Reg Pepper, an executive with the company that owns The Ranch, whose enforced adherence to one of the spa's spartan reducing diets may have tipped him over the edge. And don't forget Byron, the impossibly handsome cowboy, who leads the Ranch's daily trail rides. Then there's Dr. Heather Morrison, The Ranch's humourless medical director, who's worried that radical changes proposed for the place will destroy her career. Topping the list is sushi chef Ben Sugamoto whose lucrative catering contract is about to be cancelled. This odd and oddly likeable cast of characters is joined by an attack owl, an antique calliope, a couple of race horses, and an amiable, if inept, guard dog. The mix results in a comedy of manners that serves up laughter and suspense in equal measure.

In this mix of mystery and high comedy, set amid the glories of the Rocky Mountain foothills, television photographer Phoebe Fairfax and her gorgeous but decidedly dotty on-air colleague Candi Sinclair are taping at a psychic fair. Shortly after they shoot an interview with him, arch-creep Jonathan Webster collapses and dies, murdered with a dose of agricultural pesticide administered in a most unusual way. The police immediately suspect his common law wife Tracy McMurtry, an old high-school pal of Candi's. The fact that Webster used Tracy as his personal punching bag when he wasn't busy losing all her money on one of his compulsive gambling sprees puts her at the top of their list. The impulsive Candi immediately sets out to clear her old friend's name, dragging the reluctant Phoebe in her wake. Phoebe finds the answer to the mystery of Webster's murder in the midst of a spring blizzard high in the foothills west of Calgary. Or does she? Could it be that all her efforts only serve to prove that seeing truly can be deceiving? A Globe and Mail best seller.