Meth crisis. Biker Gangs.
Can the quiet town of Grand Banks survive?
By Mike Martin
Title: SAFE HARBOUR
Author: Mike Martin
Publisher: Ottawa Press and Publishing
Pages: 264
Genre: Mystery
BOOK BLURB:
Sgt. Windflower is on a special assignment in St. John’s and adjusting to life in the big city. He is navigating traffic, a difficult boss at work and what seems like an epidemic of missing girls. He becomes more interested when he discovers that one of the girls is from Grand Bank. Then a girl approaches his RCMP van one night and he is pulled into the underlife of the capital city. But he still manages to enjoy all of the good things in life. His family, old and new friends, and the love of living so close to the Atlantic Ocean. Welcome back to St. Windflower Mysteries.
Windflower looked across the lake. Well, he would have if he could have seen anything through the thick blanket of fog that had been sitting on Quidi Vidi Lake for the past seven days. One whole week, he thought. Every day since they had arrived in the port city of St. John’s, it had been the same. Windflower knew the lake was out there because he remembered running around it as his daily exercise when he was temporarily stationed here a few years back.
Sheila Hillier, his wife, knew the lake was out there as
well. She’d spent a couple of months doing rehab at the nearby Miller Centre
when she was recovering from a serious car accident. If there wasn’t any fog,
she could look out her window in May and see the rowers getting their practice
in as part of their training for the Royal St. John’s Regatta, an annual event
that took place down there in August.
But it was a long way from spring as Windflower gazed out
his window at the typical scenery for a January morning. He was the first one
up, except for Lady, his collie, and Molly, the cat who never seemed to sleep
anyway. She would close her eyes sometimes, but Windflower had never come into
a room with her in it when she wasn’t awake and watching him. Windflower liked
this time of day when his two children got up. They were Amelia Louise, his
soon-to-be two-year-old daughter, and his almost-daughter, Stella, who he and
Sheila were fostering.
He liked this house on Forest Road, too. It wasn’t similar
to his and Sheila’s in Grand Bank on the southeast coast of Newfoundland, but
for a rental it suited them perfectly. It had four bedrooms, two and a half
baths and a large backyard for the kids to play in and, if the weather held,
for Windflower to barbeque. But the likelihood of the weather staying just
simply foggy and damp was not good. There was snow in the forecast and more
snow coming after that.
Windflower had been in snowstorms in St. John’s before. It
was hard to miss one if you travelled here regularly in the fall, winter or
spring. And they didn’t come with a few flakes or a few inches of accumulation.
No, snowstorms here often meant feet of snow, sometimes in the double digits,
and he had come out some mornings to look for his car, only to find it buried
under a virtual mountain of snow. The worst storms came in double or even
triple waves. That’s when a storm system would blow through and dump one load
of snow and then drift out to the nearby Atlantic Ocean. Unfortunately for the
good people of St. John’s, it would blow back in and repeat the damage—sometimes
more than once.
Windflower grabbed his anorak and hat and took Lady out to
the backyard. He also brought his smudging kit. Inside were small packets of
his four sacred medicines: cedar, sage, sweetgrass and tobacco. There was also
an abalone shell, a small box of wooden matches and an eagle feather fan that
had been gifted to him by his grandfather many years ago.
Mike Martin was born in St. John’s, NL on the east coast of Canada and now lives and works in Ottawa, Ontario. He is a long-time freelance writer and his articles and essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines and online across Canada as well as in the United States and New Zealand.
He is the author of the award-winning Sgt. Windflower Mystery series set in beautiful Grand Bank. There are now 10 books in this light mystery series with the publication of Safe Harbour. A Tangled Web was shortlisted in 2017 for the best light mystery of the year, and Darkest Before the Dawn won the 2019 Bony Blithe Light Mystery Award. Mike has also published Christmas in Newfoundland: Memories and Mysteries, a Sgt. Windflower Book of Christmas past and present.
Mike is Past Chair of the Board of Crime Writers of Canada, a national organization promoting Canadian crime and mystery writers and a member of the Newfoundland Writing Guild and Ottawa Independent Writers.
Website: www.sgtwindflowermysteries.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mike54martin
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheWalkerOnTheCapeReviewsAndMore
A PERFECT STORM
A TWIST OF FORTUNE
FIRE FOG AND WATER
MORE…
