Burden of Memory - Softcover

""After a messy divorce, Elaine Benson thinks that taking a job helping wealthy Canadian matriarch Moira Madison write her memoirs might be just the thing to get her nonfiction writing career back on track. Unfortunately, she didn't bargain for Moira's contentious extended familythree generations of relatives full of opinions and resentments about Moira's project and about one another. The contemporary family story, viewed through Elaine's outsider perspective, alternates with Moiras disjointed recollections of years as a nurse in Europe during World War II, where she meets the love of her life and learns a secret about her beloved brother that she guards long after his death. Although Moira and her household are distinctive, it's difficult to keep some of the numerous other supporting characters straight, and hints of mystery and the supernatural (Is there a ghost, or isn't there?) never expand into real suspense. Even so, readers who favor leisurely puzzles steeped in family dynamics and flavored with descriptions of beautiful scenery may find this just what theyre looking for.""--Booklist

Elaine Benson, a successful novelist who jettisoned her career over an unreliable screenwriter, is now divorced, broke, and come to a "primitive, untamed northern forest" on Lake Muskoka to interview for a job. Elderly Miss Moira Madison of the fabulously rich Canadian Madisons wishes to write her memoirs. Miss Madison isn't interested in a bestseller. She wants to leave a record of her life, especially of her years with the Canadian Army Nursing Sisters of World War II. Her service in the British and then European theater was filled with triumphs and bitter losses that forever shaped her life. Can Elaine tell her story working with decades of old documents? Settling into the family "cottage" and what remains of a lifestyle long gone, Elaine rediscovers her love of researching the past. But she soon discovers the first writer Miss Madison hired had drowned in the Lake. And now her own project stirs someone to murder..