The Unburied Past

July 8, 2013
Character rather than police procedure drives this suspenseful mystery from British veteran Fraser (Shifting Sands). In 1986, the double slaying of Mark and Emma Franklyn at their home in the Lake District results in the separation of their two small children, Adam and Kirsty. In 2012, Adam, who has been raised in Canada, leaves the Toronto college where he heads the French department for a sabbatical year in England. There he reunites with his sister, whom he scarcely knows and doesn’t particularly like. Determined to learn the truth about the murder of their parents, Adam spends all his free time retracing the inconclusive investigation of 1986, while Kirsty wants only to unmask the man who has been sending her anonymous gifts. Fraser strikes a good balance between the siblings and between past and present as flashbacks slowly reveal the events that led up to the tragedy. Readers will be sufficiently enthralled to forgive the deus ex machina ending.

July 1, 2013
Siblings work to solve their parents' murders. Twenty-six years ago, the parents of Adam and Kirsty were killed while on a family vacation in England's Lake District. Adam was adopted by his paternal aunt's family and grew up to become a teacher in Canada; Kirsty was taken in by her childless maternal aunt and husband in England. Over the years, their families' strained relationship kept the siblings from seeing much of each other. Only when Adam announces his intention of going to his English hometown to teach for a year and research his family history do the panic-stricken relatives tell him and Kirsty the truth. Their parents were not killed in an automobile accident, as they had always thought, but were murdered for unknown reasons by someone who left their two children alive in their vacation rental. Kirsty doesn't initially share Adam's determination, but after they meet again, they quickly grow closer, and both set off for the Lake District looking for clues to the past. They're assisted by their father's best friend and fellow photographer, who's saved a tape of a TV segment that examined the cold case. Meanwhile, Kirsty must deal with a stalker who's sending her creepy messages and gifts and may be a rapist and murderer the police are searching for. The pair soon discover that a man went missing the same day as the murders. Although his body was found in a lake weeks later and his death written off as an accident, the incident gives them a starting point in their search, which will change their lives forever. There's not much mysterious in this pleasant cozy, but Fraser (A Question of Identity, 2012, etc.) provides some sympathetically prickly characters.

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