Speak for the Dead

January 23, 2023
Tector’s strong sequel to 2022’s The Foulest Things opens at Canada’s Dominion Archives, where Ontario coroner Cate Spencer has been called to the scene of an apparent suicide. Hanging from a ceiling pipe in a nitrate film storage facility is the body of 23-year-old Molly Johnson, an archives employee. The police are eager for Cate to rule the death a suicide, thus relieving them of the responsibility to investigate, but she’s troubled by some anomalies, including the lack of signs that Molly struggled before dying. Beset by doubts about her own objectivity, Cate worries that she wants a murder to probe to avoid dealing with her emotional challenges after the recent death of her physician brother in a plane crash while working for Medical Aid International in the Congo. Indications that foul play, linked to the “biggest land deal in Ottawa history,” may have led to Molly’s death thicken the plot. Tector smoothly balances her lead’s struggles with alcohol in the wake of her brother’s death with developments in the well-crafted mystery. Temperance Brennan fans will be pleased.