Terminal Year
Book 1 of the Lila Birch Murder Mystery Series
Lively, energetic, and with a quirky tendency for inner monologues, Lila Birch lives her dream in the small, picturesque university town of Collinghurst, in the lake district of central Ontario. Most of what she needs is within a short walking or bicycling distance of her cozy second-floor apartment in a Victorian house, either on the town's quiet streets or the paths along the banks of the Atikokan River that runs through town. Her graduate student life is financed by a graduate scholarship and paid work on the Brent University campus as teaching or research assistant. Another large chunk of her income comes from regular bar tending gigs at one of the local watering holes, the Comfort and Joy. It is her terminal year of the PhD program in anthropology, and her thesis work is going well. She has plenty of company from a small group of graduate student friends while she enjoys steady support from her Finnish immigrant parents who retired from Collinghurst to an even smaller Ontario town.
One October evening, Lila gets an urgent phone call from one of her close graduate student friends. Rushing to her side, Lila finds her murdered body and feels compelled to investigate the case. With no knowledge of crime investigation which is officially being handled by the Ontario Provincial Police Investigation Unit, Lila relies on her academic smarts and training – along with more than a modicum of spunk – to put her wise. As her inquiries advance, Lila finds herself suspecting and second-guessing the actions and motives of people she thought she knew and considered friends. She finds out about the tangled relationships in her dead friend’s family and with people in their mutual student and faculty circles. As tensions build in Lila’s pursuit of the culprit, she faces personal danger. As she closes in on the murderer, she has to manage not only the investigation, her work and studies, but her growing attraction to the increasingly present and concerned OPP investigator whose warnings for her to stop her meddling fall on deaf ears.
Publisher: Self-published
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781069977816
Location: Collinghurst, Ontario (Fictional)
Sub-genres: Small Town , Women Sleuths , Academia
