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“I must say you’ve gone native. You look the quintessential cliché of a Canadian in that get up��

Notwithstanding the fact that the 1940s version of “quintessentially Canadian�� wouldn’t have included mental pictures of a scruffy hoser sporting a toque and red buffalo plaid jacket and gripping a frosty bottle of beer and a hockey stick, Lane Winslow probably took her friend’s comment as a tribute to the progress she had made leaving her experience as an officer in British Intelligence during the war behind and going Canadian. But her expertise in solving puzzles, her linguistic abilities, her warming relationship with a police detective, and the western world’s post-WW II relations with Stalin quickly chilling into the mid-20th century Cold War forced her onto center stage in the matter of the death (murder?) of a Russian man in a harmless local Doukhobor community.

“There was the obvious physical beauty of her dark eyes and auburn hair, of course, but the allure of her intelligence and hidden depths of resourcefulness and maybe even sadness added something, he decided, that perhaps was not found in �� his current girl.��

Character development, historical ambience, and local colour are all first rate. Consider, for example, a bank manager’s condescending misogynistic response to Ms Winslow’s attempts to open a bank account with a cheque which she had received by way of an unexpected inheritance from her deceased father:

�� ‘It is most unusual to conduct such business with a woman. I would feel a lot more comfortable if you had a husband to take care of these affairs for you��, he said now with a slight air of disapproval.��

Whishaw portrayed Lane Winslow’s grudging acceptance of this disheartening reality brilliantly.

That said, it is probably believed by most readers of the mystery genre that such novels, of necessity, require a plot. In this regard, DEATH IN A DARKENING MIST was slow and overly lengthy. The actual mystery and its ultimate resolution fell somewhere between mildly disappointing and merely pedestrian and workmanlike.

So there you have it, four stars for the characters and the background and two stars for the plot, so we’ll call it a 3-star mystery overall that still leaves me as a Lane Winslow fan looking forward to the third installment in the series, AN OLD, COLD GRAVE.

Paul Weiss