THE GREY LADY
The Grey Lady
Nadine Doolittle
Canadian rights: McArthur & Company
All other rights available
"The kind of book you want to read with a fire crackling in the hearth, a hot drink by your side, and a blanket within reach ... so tightly written and perfectly paced, we feel we are being swept along by the story, like a fallen branch in a fast-flowing river of spring runoff."
- The Montreal Review of Books
“A line exists between the person we control and the one who lurks in the corner, waiting. Useful in a crisis, completely without conscience, ruthless and loyal, our other will come when called but will not respond to whistles to draw it back. Our other will destroy a friend, burn out an old man, cheat a lover and steal a life's work. Cross the line at your peril”.
In 1974, twenty-two year old Hester Warnock’s love affair with Malcolm Driver on a farm-turned-commune led to the death of a young pregnant girl named Beth Sherry. Thirty-five years later, now a successful magazine publisher, Hester is invited back to the scene of the crime to participate in a documentary of Malcolm’s life and times. The next morning, in the middle of a fierce rainstorm, she finds her ex-lover hanging from a tree.
Battling the driving rain, Detective Sergeant Rompré lacks physical evidence of a crime but doubts Driver killed himself. Hester holds a clue that proves Malcolm’s death wasn’t suicide but her own past with him haunts her. Meanwhile, the secret resentments and hidden hates of the seven other guests are revealed; a trail of deceit, adultery, abortion and murder which all leads back to Malcolm Driver. Hester's own story of betrayal is unravelled as she draws closer to the truth about herself. The two tragedies collide, past and present, on a wild rain-filled night. Hester confesses to Rompré that she drove Beth Sherry to suicide with an act of cruelty and Rompré offers absolution that Hester can’t bring herself to accept. Her story is the final proof the detective needed that Malcolm’s death was not a suicide, but it is not enough to lead him to the killer.
Hester’s mother calls and reminds her of a minor domestic detail which triggers a memory of the day Malcolm died. She rushes back to the farm and is just in time to prevent another death. Justice is done, but for Hester, there’s no peace. Thirty-five years ago she fell in love with a devil. These things happen to young women and she's been able to exonerate herself for that crime. But Beth Sherry is another story. She has become Hester's shadow place. Like the snow in April that lingers at the edges of the forest where the sun doesn’t reach, Beth Sherry lingers in Hester. She is doing penance for her and will for always.
Set in the wilds of Quebec, Grey Lady is a tense psychological thriller which explores the power play between men and women and asks whether crimes of passion can ever be excused.
Nadine Doolittle was born in Comox, British Columbia in 1960 to an RCAF mechanic and a Scottish housewife. She graduated with a degree in Theatre Arts from Vancouver Community College’s prestigious Studio 58 program and launched into a career in acting. After ten years in theatre, and with the birth of her first child, she switched careers to become a casting associate at Alliance Productions in Toronto. A move to rural Wakefield, Quebec coincided with another career change to writing, first as an award-winning reporter with the Low Down to Hull and Back News in the Gatineau Hills, and later as a columnist for the Ottawa Metro News covering transit issues in the nation’s capital. During this time she wrote her first novel, Iced Under, published in 2008 and shortlisted for Canada’s major crime fiction award, the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel, in 2009. Nadine now makes her home on 22 forested acres in Alcove, Quebec where she writes novels full time.
