ARTHUR ELLIS AWARD, CRIME WRITERS OF CANADA: BEST NOVEL
CANADIAN AUTHORS’ ASSOCIATION AWARD FOR FICTION
“Wright is at the top of her form.” The Toronto Sun
“A psychological novel in the tradition of P.D. James.” Books in Canada
Available in May, 2018 through Felony and Mayhem Press.
Mother Love, the eleventh novel by award-winning author L.R. Wright, skillfully combines elements of mystery, psychological suspense and astonishing insight into the human psyche.
In 1995, Mother Love was the first “genre” novel to win the prestigious Canadian Authors’ Association Award for Fiction.
Seven years after leaving her husband and young daughter, Maria Buscombe is found dead in her apartment, the victim of a brutal bludgeoning. Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg, detouring from a flirtation with early retirement, begins to unravel the mysteries surrounding the murder. Who was Maria Buscombe? Why had she left her family so abruptly, never to re-establish contact? How did she come to have recent photographs of her only child in her possession? Who was stalking the troubled woman - and why?
But initial inquiries uncover more questions than answers. Alberg meets resistance and suspicion from both of Maria’s fathers - one biological, the other adoptive - and glimpses the rage and deep pain of the dead woman’s daughter Belinda, now herself a mother-to-be.
As Alberg becomes engrossed in the riddles, his longtime girlfriend, Cassandra Mitchell, continues to struggle with her own fears, those of loneliness and mortality, brought on by her recent kidnapping. She is afraid to be alone, even in her own home, and feels increasingly reliant on Karl. In her own mother, now in a nursing home but still fiercely independent, Cassandra seeks the strength she needs to confront her demons head-on. Deftly weaving past and present, Mother Love lays bare the deep secrets hidden in all human relationships, and challenges notions of love, forgiveness, and what it means to be someone’s child - or someone’s mother.