Follow Hunter Rayne as he solves a mystery back in 1995 when a lorry crashes off a road in Canada, killing the driver.
I found Slow Curve on the Coquihalla to be a soft, cosy mystery even though it involved a fatality. Hunter Rayne is a fellow trucker who was asked by the dead driver’s daughter to look into her dad’s death. But Hunter is no average trucker because he used to be a mountie with the RCMP.
R. E. Donald writes a lot of detail into her mystery - loads of paragraphs describing the colours of the landscape, the roads and locations alongside plus the workings of a haulage company. I was not bothered by her lengthy descriptions of landscapes and vegetation but loved that her locations were real and not fictional or generic.
Of great interest to me were all the details about the workings of the transport industry. Readers must remember that the technical side of trucking has moved on a tremendous amount since 1995. With modern telematics, every damn thing is monitored and recorded, there would be no mystery at all about this road traffic accident.
R. E. Donald used to work in the haulage industry and her understanding of the work and the drivers really shines through. I have never driven a lorry but many of my Facebook friends have moved over from coaches to lorries and the attitudes and issues they raise are the same as she describes. For all that bus, coach and lorry drivers enjoy their job and working on their own, whenever they compare notes, they are always moaning about similar things, year in, year out. Honest, all professional drivers are content and happy but we can have a good old moan.
Solving the mystery of the lorry crash was a steady plod with lots of finger pointing. I found the parts about Hunter’s family life tedious to read through and were an unwelcome distraction from the core of this mystery. The solving of the mystery was not mind blowing and was something to roll along with. Because the quality of her writing about trucking culture held my interest throughout this book, I consider this novel to be an Okay 3 star read.
Kitty Dunn had a small part to play in this story but she had the best line of dialogue when she said “Yes, it suited me well. Over the years, I’d gotten used to being alone, and I like having my own home without the clutter of a full-time husband”.
Slow Curve on the Coquihalla was written in 2011 and is available as an Amazon Kindle eBook.
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