Guest Blogger - Vicki Delaney

The victim in the latest Constable Molly Smith novel, Winter of Secrets, was not a nice person.

Did he have to die?
No.
Did he deserve to die?
No.

But he did, and as a direct result of his attitudes and behavior.
Winter of Secrets is set between Christmas Eve and New Years Day in the mountains in the British Columbia Interior. A group of wealthy, privileged University students from Ontario has come to the little town of Trafalgar on a two-week skiing vacation.
There’s Jason and Wendy Wyatt-Yarmouth, siblings. Jason is a med-student, handsome, charming, and thoroughly lazy. Wendy is a bitter, angry young woman whose resentment against the world, specifically her parents, expresses itself in shopping for luxury goods even she can’t afford. With them are Alan and Sophie. Alan is handsome enough to be an actor and Sophie, the Québécoise, is his new girlfriend. Alan and Sophie spend quite a bit of the vacation in their room. Ewan is there, Jason’s childhood friend, who never met a woman he didn’t want to screw, and Rob who brought his computer on holiday so as to be sure not to miss any action in the stock market. And Jeremy, who just seems to have attached himself to the group.
All of them are looking for a lot more than good skiing. Sex and drugs and making trouble are high on the list.
It is the ‘making trouble’ part that involves them initially with the Trafalgar City Police.
As Sergeant John Winters thinks, “this pack of drama kings and queens…”.

There are other people in town, of course. Locals who see rich vacationers moving in on their girlfriends, young people also in town for the skiing but who have to cobble together two or sometimes three jobs to make enough money to be able to stay, small-town girls who mistake a holiday romance for a life-time commitment.
Put them all together and you have a lot of possibility for conflict.
In the meantime, Molly Smith, now out of probation and a Constable Third Class wants to get as much time on the ski slopes as she can. Unfortunately the Wyatt-Yarmouths and their friends are also at the resort:
People lined the walls, some of them still gripping plates or cups. A long wooden table had been overturned, bowls of food and mugs of coffee spilled onto the floor. Two men were taking wild punches at each other, yelling and swearing all the while. Blood streamed from the nose of the larger man. In their inflexible ski boots they moved as if they were performing a ballet at the bottom of the Upper Kootenay River. The police officer trying to get through the crowd to reach them walked with no less difficulty.
There were a lot of people not unhappy at the death of the victim in Winter of Secrets. But did anyone actually kill him? That is the question Sergeant John Winters and Constable Molly Smith have to answer.
The first chapter of Winter of Secrets is posted on my web page, if you’d like a sneak peek: www.vickidelany.com