To Karl Alberg, a small town on Canada's Sunshine Coast looks like the perfect place to soothe a psyche that's been battered by too much big-city police work. Bees buzz among the roses, and the local librarian is attractive, intriguing, and unattached. Perhaps he has at last come in from the cold. But sunny towns can conceal a lot of secrets, some of them bleak enough to make a man yearn for nice straightforward urban crime. Certainly, that would be simpler than unraveling the brutal, unlikely, and unpremeditated murder of an eighty-five-year-old man!