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Clean Sweep: A Murder MysteryAlfred Silver226 pages Order this book: |
![[Cover of Clean Sweep]](../images/1895900646.jpg)
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Who knows more about what's been swept under the carpet than the cleaning lady?
Forty-something Bonnie Marsden didn't intend to become a professional charwoman, or an amateur detective. But after she gets swindled out of her job as loans officer at The Friendly Village Credit Union in Membertou County, Nova Scotia, she has to find some way to help pay the bills. Once she starts tidying other people's houses, she starts stumbling across things that tweak her overabundant curiosity and sense of right and wrong — things like a five-year-old child lost in the woods, and a retired couple killed in a botched home invasion.
Bonnie's husband, Big Ben Marsden, is sceptical about poking into the corners of other people's lives. He lost his steady job two years ago and keeps up his half of the mortgage payments by cobbling together odd jobs, some of them so odd he hasn't mentioned them to his wife. They have three children living away, and a very late surprise package still living at home. Invariably, Ben and the children get drawn into Bonnie's attempts to suss out what's going on under the surface.
The surface of the community they live in, like any part of rural Canada, may look bucolic from the highway, but people with several acres between themselves and their nearest neighbours can get up to some strange behaviour without anybody noticing. It's a place where well-off hobby farmers live just around the corner from people who don't grow vegetable gardens for a hobby but because they have to, and who make it through their hardscrabble days with humour and grace. Corporal Kowalchuck, the new detachment commander of the local RCMP, is a prairie boy not privy to secrets lurking in the community Bonnie's lived in all her life. But maybe Corporal Kowalchuck has some secrets of his own.
Alf Silver was born in Brandon, Manitoba, and grew up in cities and small towns across the prairies. He's published nine novels, including Acadia, Three Hills Home and The Haunting of Maddie Prue. More than forty of his scripts have been produced by CBC Radio, including the Clean Sweep mystery series. He recently recorded a second album of his own songs, They Don't Make 'em Anymore. Winner of the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize (for Acadia) and now in his fifties, Alfred Silver is proud to say he's never spent longer than one night in jail or longer than two weeks in a psychiatric institution. His definition of "versatile" is "Any gig in a storm."