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Book #23 in a mystery series featuring Joanne Kilbourn, this book came to this reader with history attached. Initially a Canadian series I loved, based in Saskatchewan, and featuring a wonderfully-accessible female professor,— a character authored so well, and decades before strongly centered, plain-spoken, independent female leads were a common literary thing.

Around the middle of the series, the stories changed — becoming less mystery-focused and more novel-like, occupied now mainly with Joanne and her ever growing web of family, friends, lovers, and political contacts, with just a touch of mystery thrown in. I lost track of the series around book #10.

Picking up book #23 now, out of the blue and a decade or so later, has been interesting. The author has stuck to her change in format, centering this book on the long and fabulously detailed series of happenings (mainly depicted as conversations) featuring Joanne and the hugely complex family and community she anchors. There is but a hint of mystery that eventually blooms in the last quarter of the book.

I enjoyed this book, and its meanderings. It’s relational sweetness and yes, even its hints of wealth, touching, some might say, on complacency. As throughout it all, there is indeed a genuine sense of compassion and conscientiousness that Joanne, now a grandmother and aging matriarch (still plain-spoken and depended on by absolutely everyone) shares with the reader. Less political now, she continues to want, it is abundantly clear to the reader, to do her part to make “the” world, her world, a better place. For all her solitary friends.

An appealing, evolving perspective.

So much so that going back to now read book #ten, or perhaps all the way back to the start of the series, might be a compelling idea.

A great big thank you to ECWpress for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.