Windows To The World

                    SHE FELT NO PAIN
                                                 LOU    ALLIN

RCMP Corporal Holly Martin is enjoying the summer in the area known as Canada's Caribbean.

This is the vacation mecca of Vancouver Island where the year round clement weather has people moving there by the score. Martin has been stationed at Fossil Bay not very far from where she grew up.Fossil bay gets its's name from, well you guessed it, fossils! She is in charge of the local three  person police force , the law enforcers for the expanding population. Her cohorts are Corporal Ann Troy who would have been the head of the unit except for physical problems and Constable Chirakumar Knox Singh a Sikh, who in Canada is allowed to wear a handsome light-blue turban designed for the force as a part of multi-culturalism. 


Aside from the hikers, campers, and the enlarging group of homeless drifters  there are visitors doing all kinds on neo  touristy things such as geocaching.  This is a game with an Internet site for which a GPS is needed. After visiting on online site users search for treasures using co-ordinates. The treasures are usually small things that kids like such as pins, balloons, toys and so forth. When the caches are found something is taken and something is left in it's place and logs are kept. It was one family pursuing such a cache that stumbled across a body. 


                                                                                                                                                                         At first it seemed to be a simple  death by overdose of a homeless person because all the paraphernalia required for that activity were at the scene, but there were several other puzzling facts, an unusual amount of money found at the scene, an ancient scrap of paper, a familiar photograph and more questions that needed answers. 








As this murder is investigated Corporal Martin's  concerns about the other drifters in the area were mostly about the fears of fire at this time.Things are so dry that the area is like a tinder box and this adds to the tension. This is the second book in the RCMP Holly Martin series following AND ON THE SURFACE DIE  in which Allin portrays Martin as naive and inexperienced . Clues have to circle her sometimes more than twice before they penetrate. She takes days to question the last people to see a murder victim and examine the victim's room for instance. 


In SHE FELT NO PAIN Martin is much more grounded although she still makes some pretty big errors in judgement, but she has not had very much experience as yet, in view of some of the scrapes she gets into she may not live long enough to get any.


Still the area that Allin writes about is unique enough to make the reader want to pack up and go there, but Canada's Caribbean, my eye! It is great in the winter but it does NOT get very warm there in June, July or August! The homeless leave for the summer apparently to seek nicer places to stay.

Over all while the mystery and the back story are interesting the location wins the prize.