To Die In Spring: A Rebecca Temple Mystery (Rebecca Temple Mysteries): 1 - Softcover

Short-listed for the 2002 Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel

Dr. Rebecca Temple has just returned to practice in an old converted house in the Kensington Market area of Toronto, six months after the death of her artist husband, when she's confronted with the violent murder of a patient she had earlier diagnosed as paranoid. Sylvia Warsh's accomplished first novel explores the decades-old deceptions and plots that go back to World War Two Poland and underlie the murder of Goldie. Even as Rebecca struggles with guilt over the misdiagnosis which may have led to her patient's death, she becomes the killer's next target.

...To Die in Spring is Torontonian Sylvia Warsh's first published mystery and it's a good deal better than the work of many veterans. It's also set up as a kickoff to a promising series featuring Dr. Rebecca Temple, a young widow recovering from the early death of her beloved artist husband.

...The novel is set in 1979, which puts it in temporal reach of the Second World War as well as the horrors of Argentina, where many Nazis and some surviving Jews fled after the war. Warsh handles fairly deftly the now-historical issues, putting them into the terms and mouths of characters who display the full range of greed and obsession required to play out her plot.

...Warsh, who teaches creative writing to seniors in Toronto, does a fine job of unwrapping mysterious identities until both sins and crimes lie satisfactorily revealed.