‘And On the Surface Die’ by Lou Allin
Published by Napoleon Publishing/RendezVous Press, October 2008.
ISBN: 978-1-894917-74-2

Holly Martin is an RCMP Corporal in Fossil Bay, located “on the wild south coast of Vancouver Island,” Canada, an hour west of Victoria, British Columbia and a quick ferry ride away from Seattle.  It is explained that “Southern Vancouver Island is Canada’s Caribbean.  Little if any snow, but deluges of hail, sleet and rain all winter,” and in Fossil Bay itself, with its rocky beaches, and inhabited by 500 people in a dozen streets, they “don’t have any stoplights, so nothing ever changes but the weather.  Even the geese don’t leave.”  The RCMP detachment is manned by three cops supported by a small volunteer staff.

As the book opens Holly gets a call about a 17–year-old girl found drowned at a spot called Botanical Beach – is it an accidental drowning, or is something more involved?  [The dead girl was apparently a champion swimmer.]  It had been an innocent-enough outing, a traditional one with chaperones and 45 members of the graduating class of a local Catholic school which Holly herself had attended years earlier, but often, as the author notes, “what looked perfect on the surface was a tangled mess behind.”

Those of us from parts of the world other than North America and even from “the lower 48” may have to get used, as this reader did, to colloquialisms and local vernacular and even terminology of the area [i.e., the indigenous, aboriginal “natives” are referred to as First Nations, with the term “Indians” now considered not p.c.]

Holly is a very interesting protagonist.  Never far from her mind is her mother, a social activist who just disappeared one day.  Holly only recently reunited with her nearly-sixty-year-old father, a university professor nearing sixty who has never wanted to declare Holly’s mother dead despite the passage of ten years.  This book is the first in the Holly Martin series.  I would surmise that this story line will be picked up in future books.  One can only hope.  It should be noted that the author has previously written five books in the popular Belle Palmer Series, which took place in the nickel-mining community of Sudbury, Ontario.  [In case you were wondering, the title of the book is from a poem by Tennyson.] . Recommended.

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Reviewed by Gloria Feit