"Anything But Dull"

Gloria Trevisi, recently married but living alone, is the object of every gossip in a small Canadian town. Is she single, widowed, lesbian, or what? Add to that she's reporting news in a job with employees who resent her. They are her manager who resents the decision to hire her made over his head to the guy who works under her who thinks he should have received her position. So when the usual news of society events and gossip gets momentarily discarded in light of the murder of a community leader, tempers, rumors, and personality power games are extraordinarily heightened indeed!

Just as Gloria's detective instincts are revving up for what seems like an interesting job for a change, the entire family decides to visit the same weekend her husband, Tony, a chamber orchestral musician, is finally getting a weekend free to spend with his wife. In one sense, discussing the murder detracts from what starts out as a calamitous meeting of Gloria's mother and her upper crust in-laws. For solving this murder becomes very complex as numerous people had multiple reasons to want to kill Clarence McKee.

It turns out that the building of an industrial park has upset many people, from those who resent its planned site to those who deplore the unhealthy and unsafe septic problem it's causing. Of course there are also those who stand to make a bundle of money from the deals in this project, and they just conveniently happen to run the town council as well.

Add rumors of cheating on spouses, a returning citizen who plans on permanently settling in the town, a young man who received a bad referral from the deceased and thereby lost a promising job, several accidents, break-ins, abuse of drugs, and numerous other tidbits. Thus we have the fragments beginning to come together in the discovery process carried out by this feisty, metropolitan-styled journalist who refuses to be threatened or cajoled into ending her quest.

Rural Sprawl is a grand "who done it" novel that will delight every true mystery lover who is unable to predict the ending and is fully engaged with the chief heroine in solving a complex, gritty murder!

TERRIFIC READ!

Reviewed by Viviane Crystal on October 14, 2005

Reviewed by Viviane Crystal
Courtesy Crystal Reviews
Posted October 13, 2005

Summary

Murder, country style.... Pick up a copy of The Plattsford Sun, and find out who missed the last meeting of the altar guild, who had unexpected company last week, and who was found murdered in a muddy construction site. Gloria Trevisi, Canadian-Italian city transplant and newest editor of the Sun, needs some peace and quiet to come to terms with the recent twists of her own life: a marriage that may be over before it has begun, the end of a promising career in corporate communications, and the sudden move from Toronto to the middle of Southwestern Ontario's corn belt. She thought that life in this rural backwater would be dull.... The murder of a local politician and businessman, however, has set local inhabitants on edge. They're looking for a quick, easy solution, preferably outside their immediate social circle. Gloria's mission, when she isn't dealing with an absent husband, concerned parents, furious in-laws, and a leaching, smelly septic bed, is to sort through a maze of local gossip, delve behind the polite facade of rural politics and social life, and find out the truth before her newspaper goes to press. Someone, however, does not want to see it in print.