The Suspect

by L.R. Wright

Book Overview

To Karl Alberg, a small town on Canada's 'Sunshine Coast' looks like the perfect place to soothe a psyche that's been battered by too much big-city police work.

Bees buzz among the roses, and the local librarian is attractive, intelligent, and unattached. Perhaps he has at last come in from the cold. But sunny towns can conceal a lot of secrets, some of them bleak enough to make a man yearn for some nice straightforward urban crime...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1934609072
• ISBN13: 9781934609071
• Release Date: June 2008
• Publisher: Felony & Mayhem
• Length: 245 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Atypical and A-One!

How did I not find this book and author sooner? I happened upon it by accident only recently and was delightfully surprised. The author took a decidedly different approach to writing a mystery and it worked beautifully. The book opens with the reader knowing immediately who was killed, how he was killed, who did the deed - but not why. It takes most of the book to learn those details and I enjoyed the entire ride. What made it even more enjoyable was how the author depicted all the 'shades of grey' surrounding the murder and everyone it touches, including the man who committed the crime. The author doesn't skimp on details like the story's locale, describing Canada's Sunshine Coast so vividly it practically becomes a character unto itself. She's equally adept at fleshing out characters, even secondary ones, making them interesting in their own right. I loved how the lead investigator Karl Alberg is pulled reluctantly into a game of psychological cat-and-mouse with the murderer. Alberg even finds time for a budding romance with the local librarian who happens to be friends with the murderer and feels her sense of friendship and obligation torn between the two men. I can't wait to read the 2nd entry of this series! Recommended for fans of Ann Cleeves, Minette Walters.

A totally engaging mystery

We know right away who the murderer is. 80-year-old George Wilcox bashes 85-year-old Carlyle Burke over the head with a shell casing. The interest is all in the characters, and why George did it - and how anyone will ever prove George did it. The setting is exotic, to me at least: Canada's Sunshine Coast. It's difficult of access and sparsely populated except in tourist season. It's a gardener's paradise because of the sunshine. Gardening has made George exceptionally strong for an 80 year old. The cop in charge of the case is a Mountie, Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg. He's forty-something, divorced, and tentatively easing into a relationship with the local librarian. Awkwardly enough, she's a good friend of George's. Even Sergeant Alberg likes George, but Mounties have to get their man. As Alberg digs into the case, unsavory secrets emerge. Yet this civilized murder mystery makes curiously pleasant reading, with no gratuitous sex or violence and no unbearable suspense. Be prepared to like everyone but the victim.

L.R. Wright's "The Suspect" is a gift to mystery literature.

I credit my mother for turning me into a reader. Even when we didn't have a lot of money for things, and she was working multiple jobs, she always made sure that we had plenty of books around. Over 30 years later we still exchange and recommend books with one another. A large chunk of wrapped presents between us have the familiar heft and density of a nice hard-backed novel, the two ridges that wrap around from the spine clearly felt. And it doesn't spoil the fun knowing that a book is inside; the thrill is discovering which book it is. This holiday my mother gave me L.R. Wright's The Suspect. Despite the mad success that Wright has had with her series of mystery novels, this was to be my first one. And it was a perfect place to start. The Suspect was Wright's first stab at mystery after a successful career writing literary fiction. And her first attempt was enough to win the Edgar award for best novel that year. She followed this brilliant debut up with eight more critically-acclaimed novels featuring detective Karl Alberg, the last one written in 1998. The writing quality in The Suspect reminded me a lot of Tana French's skill. In my review of her book In the Woods, I commented on the luck that mystery writers had in winning over someone who could obviously be winning Pulitzers instead of Edgars. I think our genre won a major coup, then, when L.R. Wright experimented with mystery and decided to stick around. Her skill at crafting ideas out of words is so beautiful and flawless that the genius of it washes over you instead of bowling you over. Her pages are like beautiful gardens that serve as a quiet backdrop, completely unobtrusive; but if you choose to stoop and look closer, there are many layers and levels of brilliance to behold. Proof of this skill is the banal plot of The Suspect-made riveting. This is the story of George Wilcox killing a man. George is an 80-year-old man living on the "Sunshine Coast" of British Columbia. His wife recently passed away, leaving him with no family save a distant daughter. His closest friend is the local librarian, who he sees several times a week as he exchanges his reads. These books and his gardening are just about all that George has left in the world. His life is a steady and slow march towards the inevitable. And then he kills one of his neighbors in a rage. What follows is the hauntingly realistic story of three people spiraling around each other and this murder. George is in a stupor, making the mistakes typical of criminals in a rush to hide evidence, vacillating between guilt and rationalization, working tirelessly to not be caught but dying to confess to someone. Where most authors take us into the brain of a mad serial-killer, Wright's genius is to show us the far more complex thoughts and emotions of one of us caught in this maddening web. It is overwhelmingly human and real and more powerful as a result. The second person caught up in these events is the Mounty Kar

Appreciatively Uncommon

After five years of tearing my way through all sorts of detective fiction and variously nuanced "policers," I discovered L. R. Wright's novel sitting on a short shelf in Powell's Books here in Portland, Oregon. The conscientious staff had put together a small set of Edgar Award winners, almost all in paperback -- and I'd say half of them displayed a thin layer of dust. Looking for an author new to me, I threw this used (nicely discounted) title into my growing pile. What the heck, right? Just a few bucks ... couldn't hurt. And so began a real appreciation for "The Suspect." If you are an ardent fan of Rankin, Mankell, Ellroy, MacDonald, Bruen, and others in the genre who can write realistic characters, those who you find yourself compelled to follow to a cathartic conclusion or personal epiphany of sorts ... then you will truly enjoy this well-told tale by Ms. Wright. Hopefully, there are more in this series (as hailed by previous reviewers above) that will keep me enthralled. As we fans of this fiction know, not all titles have the content and genuine quality to sustain us to that final page. This one does. Ha-lay-loo-yaaaaaaaaa.

A Great Start

A friend just recently introduced me to RCMP Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg and the lovely librarian Cassandra Mitchell. I love mysteries so I was disappointed when in the first chapter I learned the identity of the murderer. But the characters are so well crafted that I was hooked. The setting on the sunshine coast of Canada is unique. The plot is not so much of a 'who done it' but rather a 'why'. The motive is doled out a crumb at a time. This first book in the series has me hunting for the others.