Customer Reviews

Mother Love : A Karl Alberg Mystery with Cassandra Mitchell

I have read several other L.R.Wright mysteries and liked them very much. This one was not up to the high standards set by the others.

In this Karl Alberg mystery, a murdered woman had left husband and 13 year old daughter seven years previously with only a smidgen of a note that told hardly anything of why she left. Karl will not rest until he has solved the puzzle relating to her death and disappearance. The story is a bit contrived and moves at a very slow pace.

The long standing romance of Karl and Cassandra Mitchel has picked up finally and they have decided to get married and have begun house hunting. As always, L.R.Wright's description of Sechelt is vivid and evocative and adds immeasurably to the story.

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.