The Girl in the Wall

After leaving the Winnipeg Police force, former Inspector Frank Foote has gone into home renovations. Tearing down a wall on a Norwood Flats job one day, he and his partner come across the skeleton of a small female who has been imprisoned there. They alert the police, who confiscate their tools and remove them from the crime scene. Frank doesn’t tell them about the photograph he’s found tucked in the wall space with the young woman. He may be retired, but his investigative instincts are still strong. Tracking down the identity of the girl leads Frank into the past and down the trail of the long-forgotten Mrs. Mortimer, who’d had a short-lived business in the 1960s taking photos of the recently deceased for their families. Frank finds himself hoping against hope that she isn’t involved. But what are the odds?

AUTHOR

Alison Preston

Alison Preston was born and raised in Winnipeg. After trying on a number of other Canadian cities, she returned to Winnipeg, where she lives in the Norwood Flats area. All of her mysteries are set in the Norwood Flats, including The Rain Barrel Baby, The Geranium Girls, Cherry Bites, and Sunny Dreams. A graduate of the University of Winnipeg, and a letter carrier for 22 years, Alison has been twice nominated for the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer, following the publications of The Rain Barrel Baby (Signature Editions) and her first novel A Blue and Golden Year (Turnstone Press). She was also shortlisted for the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award for Cherry Bites.

Reviews

Winnipeg’s Alison Preston is becoming one of Canada’s most consistently good crime writers. The Girl in the Wall, her fifth novel, is as funny and smart as the last four, but it takes plotting to a new high. “Morven Rankin was born dead… It ran in her family.” That opening line is irresistible and creepily original. It takes us right into the head of an unusual woman whose story occupies the first half of the novel set in Preston’s favourite location, the Norwood Flats neighbourhood in Winnipeg. The second half of the tale takes us to the present day and former police inspector Frank Foote, whose retirement business is home renovation. When a wall is opened up, a skeleton appears. Work halts and the investigation begins. The relationship of the body to Morven Rankin (victim, witness or worse) brings us back into the historical mystery, and it’s one of Preston’s best ever.