Hour of the Fox

by Kurt Palka

This book is by a Canadian author.  It is about a Toronto lawyer who is suffering major medical/mental anguish following the death of her son, a young soldier.  She keeps thinking she failed him somehow by pursuing her career as a lawyer as well as being a mother.  Her relationship with her husband is strained.  She is living in a cottage on their property, rather than the family home as she feels closer to her son in the cottage.

As a young woman she got pregnant and was sent away to have the baby, which was put up for adoption.  After that she was sent to Paris for schooling.

The woman has a very demanding job and is travelling a lot and working long hours.  This helps to keep her mind occupied.  One day an old friend from the Maritimes contacts her and asks her to come visit as the woman's son may be in trouble with the law.  When the woman, Margaret, arrives she learns that a couple of young people, a boy and girl, have been found murdered on an island that her friend's son is supposed to be keeping an eye on (for absentee owners).  There is no evidence that the woman's son had anything to do with it.

One day two well dressed men arrive at Margaret's friends house asking for her son and a friend of his.  Later there is evidence of blood from a third person at the crime scene and a dress shoe is found in the water nearby. Police suspect that someone was stabbed and it is their blood on the pier.Margaret gets her friend, who is a nurse, to call hospitals and they find out that a man, similar to one of the men who visited the friend's house, was treated for a bad wound on his arm.

While this is all going on Margaret and her friend have a good relationship with the police, the police tell them about developments and they share what they have found with the police.

As Margaret is trying to help her friend she is also trying to keep up her legal work remotely.  She finds that being away from Toronto is helping her be less stressed.  She feels bad that the two young people have not been identified and offers to pay for the funeral and church service for them.  She gets permission to do so and has them cremated.  Then suddenly she learns that the young people are a brother and sister from South America and it looks like they may have been part of a drug smuggling operation.

In the book a wrecked boat of another fisherman is found but his body is never found.  It is assumed he was the one who was part of the drug smuggling but the two fancy dress men are not arrested.

By the end the lawyer does seem to be coming to terms with her son's death, partly through spending time with the parents of the two dead kids.  The one thing I was puzzled about was while she was so hung up on her dead son she didn't seem to give any thought to the child she gave up for adoption.  It seemed like a very loose end.

 This was an easy read, I finished it in one day, that doesn't happen very often.  It was an okay book but not terribly deep or complicated.