On Location with John Moss

What do Easter Island, Baffin Island and Toronto have in common?

Location plays an important role in my newest Quin and Morgan mystery, Reluctant Dead, released in mid-June.

Location is never simply a background in my novels; it determines action. In Still Waters, both the Rosedale setting in Toronto and the area around Blair in Waterloo County are integral to the developing mystery as well as to the characters’ lives.  

Grave Doubts again features Toronto, which is fitting since David Morgan and Miranda Quin are both Detective Sergeants who work homicide with the Toronto Police Service, but it is the confusion of the historical and contemporary city due to a corpse revealed in the demolition of a colonial house that leads to suspense and horror. The resolution takes place in the Owen Sound area and, for a truly harrowing episode, underwater in a wreck near Tobermoray.

In Reluctant Dead, Quin takes a sabbatical to Easter Island in the South Pacific to write a mystery novel and stumbles into a plot with international implications. Morgan discovers a murder on Toronto Island that leads him to the Canadian Arctic. Ultimately, the two stories connect. Easter Island, with its fabled past, and Baffin Island, with its austere and forbidding conditions, lead Morgan and Miranda through chilling adventures that are only resolved when they get back together in downtown Toronto. 

John Moss has backpacked extensively on Baffin Island and accompanied Beverley Haun on research trips to Easter Island. In Reluctant Dead, the third Quin and Morgan mystery, these interests come together. The next in the series, “The Dead Scholar,” stays closer to home and reaches farther afield. John and Beverley share a stone farmhouse in Peterborough, Ontario.
www.johnmoss.ca