About this item
Cowboy drifter Rick Cooper is on the run in the California desert when he meets Gladys Ryan, an eccentric widow who offers him a ride in her classic 1970 Mustang. Before long she convinces him to accompany her to Northern Ontario to help refurbish her hunting lodge, promising him a share of the upcoming season's profits and hinting at more. The offer is too good to pass up. Rick takes to life in the bush, working hard to make the lodge successful. In his free hours he hunts birds, reluctantly taking Bucky, Gladys' ancient golden retriever along with him. But when the lucrative season comes to an end, Gladys refuses to share the profits, instead offering the hired man a few thousand dollars in wages. In the middle of a drinking bout, an argument ensues.
About the Author
Born in Toronto, Lou Allin grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, where her film-booker father relocated. She received a PhD in English Renaissance Literature. In 1977, she returned to Canada, finding herself 400 kilometres north of Toronto in Sudbury at Cambrian College, where she was a professor of English.
With a cottage on a gigantic meteor-crater lake as her inspiration, she published poetry and short stories and began her Belle Palmer series, featuring a realtor and her German shepherd, Freya: Northern Winters Are Murder, Blackflies Are Murder, Bush Poodles Are Murder, Murder, Eh? and Memories Are Murder.
Now retired, Lou has moved to Canada's Caribbean, Vancouver Island, and lives with Friday the mini-poodle and Zia and Zodie, the agility border collies, in Sooke BC, overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca. She is former BCYukon Vice President of the Crime Writers of Canada and received the Derrick Murdoch award in 2011 for her contributions to the organization as well as the Arthur Ellis Best Novella Award in 2013 for Contingency Plan.
Her new series set near Victoria in Fossil Bay stars RCMP Corporal Holly Martin. And on the Surface Die and She Felt No Pain has been followed by Twilight is Not Good for Maidens. All the titles come from Victorian poems by Tennyson, Browning, and Christina Rossetti.
Lou has two American standalones on Kindle: A Little Learning is a Murderous Thing and Man Corn Murders. One is a literary mystery in the Michigan Upper Peninsula and the other takes place in the drop-dead gorgeous but dangerous canyons of the Utah wilderness.
An interest in literacy causes won her a contract with Orca books to write That Dog Won't Hunt and Contingency Plan, novellas designed to appeal to adults who are reluctant readers.
She's also in search of an agent for her historical mystery set in 1896 Victoria, BC. It stars Detective-Sergeant Edwin DesRosiers (The Rozzer) and opens with the murder of a woman from the demimondaine who was Edwin's first love many years ago. At this exciting time in the development of the westernmost province, Edwin has the opportunity to meet the young Emily Carr, not yet recognized as one of Canada's foremost painters. His unique background with a Quebecois father and a Jewish mother gives him many challenges, especially because his father supposedly committed suicide after a number of financial problems.
Her website is www.louallin.com, where she blogs about her five mothers, raspberry acrylic bathtub, and ecological causes such as the re-greening of the Nickel Capital and the deforestation of Vancouver Island. She loves mail at louallin@shaw.ca.