Northern Ontario realtor Belle Palmer is showing the lakefront mansion of a prominent businesswoman when she discovers the lady strangled in her bathtub. Could this third break-and-enter death reveal a serial killer at large in the Nickel Capital? The womans only child, a precocious twelve-year-old, comes to stay with Belles neighbours and wins her heart and theirs. Then after an argument, the boy disappears, riding off into the cold September night on his bicycle. Racing against time as fall temperatures plummet, Belle hooks up with a bumbling PI and joins the search. Belle must flee into the bush, where she has every chance of becoming lost and disoriented, chased by murderers who will stop at nothing to protect a multi-million-dollar criminal empire.
Born in Toronto, Canada, Lou Allin grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, where her film-booker father relocated. She received a PhD in English Renaissance Literature for her study of the murdered spy, Christopher Marlowe. With jobs scarce in the US, she returned to Canada, finding herself 250 miles north of Toronto in Sudbury, the Nickel Capital. At Cambrian College as a professor of English, she taught boring but occasionally useful courses to students of business and criminal justice.
With a cottage on a gigantic meteor-crater lake as her inspiration, she 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.
