Mother Love: A Karl Alberg Mystery with Cassandra Mitchell

by L.R. Wright

Book Overview

An award-winning mystery novel whose pleasure lies largely in the intricate relationships between the characters, Mother Love has Karl Alberg, the series protagonist, working on a case that seems to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684196735
• ISBN13: 9780684196732
• Release Date: September 1995
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 299 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.8" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Thoughtful police procedural

Edgar award-winning author Wright (The Suspect) offers an absorbing police procedural with emoitonal depth.Maria Bascombe abandoned her daughter and husband seven years earlier. On the day she decides to re-enter their lives, she is murdered.Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg, of the Canadian Mounties, probes the dead woman's past to find her killer. Why did she disappear? And who was paying her $20,000 a year? Who was sending her an annual photograph of her daughter?As Alberg delves, the narrative shifts into the past, to Maria's own investigation of the secrets kept from her by well-meaning adoptive parents. Maria's dark discoveries seem to shed ugly light on aspects of herself that frighten her. Chance and greed enter the mix, precipitating action.Meanwhile, Alberg is contemplating reluctant retirement to marry Cassandra Mitchell, still recovering from her ordeal in "Touch Of Panic". Wright uses the mystery form to examine the secrets and mistaken assumptions in all human relationships from the most loving to the most venal.She creates an atmosphere of bleak inevitability impelled by the characters' inability to communicate. While this structure robs the story of some suspense, Wright intrigues the reader with her thoughtful characterizations and the mysteries of human behavior.