Dominion Archives Mysteries

Ottawa, January 2010. Canada's historic Dominion Archives. Junior archivist Jess Kendall is struggling to find her footing in her new role. Her colleagues undermine her, her boss hates her, and her only romantic prospect hides a whiskey bottle in his desk. Desperate to make a good impression, her luck begins to change when she discovers a series of mysterious letters chronicling life in Paris at the start of the Great War. Thinking she has landed her ticket to career advancement, she dives into research in Dominion's art vault, where she stumbles upon the body of one of her colleagues. As if finding a corpse isn't frightening enough, Jess soon notices she is being stalked by a menacing figure. It's only when she makes the connection between the letters, the murder, and a priceless Rembrandt that she realizes just how high the stakes are. Can she salvage her career, unravel a World War I—era mystery, shake off her ominous stalker, solve a murder, and oh yeah, save her own life before it's too late?

It's a stormy summer day when Ottawa coroner Dr. Cate Spencer is called to the scene of an alleged suicide. Inside a narrow vault in the Dominion Archives' nitrate film storage facility, kept separate from the rest of the collection due to its dangerous combustibility, officers pressure her to rule the death a suicide. When parts of the scene don't add up and a deliberately set spark threatens her life, she suspects that this death might be a murder. Her tough façade masks a deep compassion for the victims she examines. Whether she's looking for answers because of her dedication to justice or to distract herself from anguish over her brother's recent death, her inquiries plunge her into a world of military secrets, contentious Indigenous protests, and a seventy-year-old mystery with deadly implications. Will Cate manage to pull herself away from her scotch and grief to expose an explosive historic secret and solve a murder the police doubt even exists?