Turncoat: A Marc Edwards Mystery - Tapa blanda

Upper Canada is in political upheaval, and a government spy is dead

It is January 1836 and Lieutenant-Governor John Colborne has a problem he needs solved discreetly. Joshua Smallman, the man he sent to spy on the growing support for William Lyon Mackenzie among angry farmers in the Cobourg area, is dead. Did he walk accidentally into an old Indian trap, or was he murdered? Colborne wants to know.

The man he sends to find out is Ensign Marc Edwards, newly arrived in Upper Canada, who innocently rides into an area seething with discontent. Any one of the many local radicals would have reason to eliminate a government spy. Marc soon finds himself personally embroiled in the political issues surrounding Smallman’s death.

Seduced by one farmer’s wife, bawled at by another, and entranced by a third, Marc elicits as strong a reaction from the women he meets as from the men. And everyone appears to have something to hide, from a keg of smuggled rum in the barn to secret nighttime meetings. When Mackenzie speaks at a rally in Cobourg, political tensions explode and Marc’s loyalty to the Crown is put to the test.

Fast-paced, eye-opening, gripping, Turncoat is the impressive debut novel of the Marc Edwards mystery series; a series that may prove addictive.

A former high-school teacher, Don Gutteridge taught English at the Faculty of Education at the University of Western Ontario until his retirement in 1993. As well as nine books and numerous articles on the teaching of English, Gutteridge is also the author of thirteen books of poetry and six previous novels. The Marc Edwards Mysteries are his first foray into writing crime fiction, and he had completed nine novels in the series, writing purely for his own pleasure, before a literary agent got wind of his accomplishment. The rest, as they say, is history.