Publisher's Weekly
Freelance reporter and PI Brigidok/pk Donovan has found the perfect antidote to her troubles: immersion in a case in which g the action never stops. While she continues to put yet another 24 hours between herself and her 30-year nemesis, the bottle, and to establish a comfortable lesbian lifestyle, she sets about tracking the murderer of blueblood David Thorne. Her search takes her from Quebec City, around rural Maine and to Manhattan. Along the way, she encounters a bevy of eccentric suspects: Thorne's faded widow Angele; his children, the ethereal young nun Genevieve, the startlingly handsome Paul and the brooding, illegitimate Sid; and even Thorne's formidable mother-in-law, Donovan's client. As Donovan probes a shameful family legacy, including rape, incest and alcoholism, she moves inexorably closer to long-buried truths--and the identity of Thorne's killer. With a deft sense of timing, newcomer Saum keeps the twists coming and the suspense lively. In Donovan, she has created an engaging sleuth in the tough-talking, high-minded tradition, who, one hopes, will star again in future adventures. (Sept.)

Library Journal
Claire ``Gram'' Du Lac, wealthy elderly inhabitant of Quebec, hires Brigid Donovan, recovering alcoholic at 52, to look into the murder of her son-in-law in Maine and to write a history of a group called H.O.P.E. Before realizing Claire's true motives, Brigid becomes enmeshed in a tangle of family secrets that seems to involve all of her friends. Fascinating odd characters and strange circumstances abound, but they are confusing and contrived at times. While this novel is attractive in some ways, it is also uneven; a marginal purchase.