If you like old fashioned mysteries in the amateur sleuth tradition with touches of humour and romance, you’ll like Charles Lauchlan. Charles is a young minister in turn of the 20^th century Winnipeg. Circumstances force him to take up crime investigation and to use his pastoral skills in ways never anticipated in the seminary.

Flash! So Many Windings was featured as one of the best 2021 summer reads on CBC radio’s “The Next Chapter” with Shelagh Rogers. Listen here: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thenextchapter/full-episode-june-19-2021-1.6067622/the-next-chapter-s-mystery-book-panel-recommends-9-books-to-read-this-summer-1.6070713

So Many Windings, the second book in the Charles Lauchlan series, is published by At Bay Press. You can buy it at these fine locations: Whodunit Mystery Bookstore, McNally Robinson Booksellers, or Chapters Indigo. Or order direct from At Bay Press.

Please note this schedule change! The book signing in front of Whodunit Mystery Bookstore that was scheduled for May 30, 2021 from 3pm to 5pm has had to be postponed. If you have already bought a copy and would like it signed prior to the rescheduled signing date (TBD), please get in touch with Whodunit Mystery Bookstore (or 204 284 9100). Whodunit will have signed copies available in store after the launch.

So Many Windings picks up the action where Put on the Armour of Light left off. It’s 1900 and before going home to Canada, Charles Lauchlan and Maggie Skene sign up for a bicycle tour of the Scottish Highlands. They expect to deal with sore legs, flat tires and clouds of midges on route. But not freak accidents that almost prove fatal or the shadowy figure who seems to be watching their every move. Then there is another grisly discovery. It’s murder most foul, and I’m not just talking about Scottish weather.

Put on the Armour of Light, the first book in the Charles Lauchlan series, won the Michael Van Rooy award for genre fiction at the 2016 Manitoba Book Awards. Get your copy online or in person at Whodunit Mystery Bookstore or McNally Robinson Booksellers or order direct from At Bay Press

In June of 1899, a puzzling summons to the police station knocks Charles Lauchlan’s industrious life as a young Presbyterian minister off the rails. At the station he finds his former university roommate, Peter McEvoy, who has been arrested for murder. The chief of police says it’s an open and shut case but Sergeant Andrew Setter—labelled as a misfit by his brother officers—disagrees. Charles and Setter become uneasy allies in a search for the real killer that takes them from the sleaziest bars to the most sumptuous drawing rooms of turn of the century Winnipeg.