A FALSE AND FATAL CLAIM: A LANE WINSLOW MYSTERY
By Iona Whishaw
29 July – 7pm
A False and Fatal Claim: A Lane Winslow Mystery
By Iona Whishaw
Publisher: Touchwood Editions
Author Talk: Wednesday 29 July, 7pm
Events Pavilion at the Sooke Region Museum
Lane Winslow is known in her idyllic British Columbia laketown of King’s Cove for a bad habit of finding dead bodies. This time, all she’s found is a suspiciously well-made hat abandoned in the brush, but she’s certain there’s a mystery afoot.
While Lane is overtaken by the urge to snoop around for clues, her husband, Inspector Darling, and his team at the Nelson Police Station find their straightforward case of a stolen boat suddenly complicated when a fourteen-year-old boy is reported missing from the local school. When the search for the boy, the hat’s mysterious owner, and the boat lead them to the sudden disappearances of the local café cook, a visiting wealthy investor, and seventy thousand dollars in cash, the case quickly turns into a snarled tangle of missing people and scant, circumstantial evidence.
Desperate to keep a vulnerable and possibly violent young boy safe, Lane recruits the neighbours as Darling, Ames, Terrell, and April scour the local towns and wildernesses for answers—all while Ames struggles to focus through wedding jitters, and April and Terrell chafe under the questionable advice of meddlesome old “friends.” At first, the daily dramas of King’s Cove unfold uninterrupted around the simmering questions at the heart of this far-reaching mystery, but as the case reveals its roots in both the glitzy high society and criminal underground of 1920s Toronto, it soon becomes clear all hands will be needed on deck to get everyone to the coming wedding alive in one piece.
Books will be available for purchase and signing after the presentation.
About the Author:
Iona Whishaw has been a youth worker, social worker, teacher and an award winning High School Principal, who continued with her writing throughout her working life. Receiving her Masters in Creative writing from UBC, Iona has published short fiction, poetry, poetry translation and one children’s book, Henry and the Cow Problem. The Lane Winslow mystery series is her first foray into adult fiction.
Iona was born in Kimberley BC, but grew up in a number of different places, including a small community on Kootenay Lake, as well as Mexico and Central America, and the US because of her father’s geological work. She took a degree in history and education from Antioch College, and subsequent degrees in Writing at UBC and pedagogy at Simon Fraser University. Her own writing output took a brief back seat during her teaching career, but she shared her passion for writing by nurturing a love of writing in the students in English, Creative Writing, and Spanish classes. During the course of her career as a Principal in Vancouver she was awarded the Woman of Distinction in Education by the YWCA in 2010 and a Canada’s Outstanding Principals award in 2012.
Her hobbies have included dance, painting, reading, and gardening. She currently is a vocalist for a small Balkan dance band in Vancouver, and is patiently waiting for her next opportunity to engage in her current pash, long distance, cross country rambling in England.
She is married, has one son and two grandsons, and lives in Vancouver with her artist husband, Terry Miller.
Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific
By Coll Thrush
Thursday 22 January – 7pm
Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific
By Coll Thrush
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Author Talk: Thursday 22 January, 7pm
Events Pavilion at the Sooke Region Museum
In this provocative retelling of shipwreck tales from the coasts of Vancouver Island, Washington, and Oregon, historian and author Coll Thrush uses maritime misfortune to think about larger themes of history on the Northwest Coast. From a Spanish galleon wrecked in 1693 to an empty tanker broken on the shore in 1999, Wrecked is a new history of an iconic element of regional history, mythology, and identity.
Books will be available for purchase and signing after the presentation.
About the Author:
Coll Thrush (born 1970) is a settler historian who was raised in Auburn, Washington, in the treaty territory of the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe. A graduate of Fairhaven College at Western Washington University in Bellingham and the University of Washington in Seattle, Coll is professor of history and associate faculty in critical Indigenous studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, on unceded Musqueam territory. In 2021, Coll was named a UBC Killam teaching laureate. He is also the founding co-editor of the Indigenous Confluences book series at the University of Washington Press.
Coll is a scholar of Indigenous and colonial histories, usually with a focus on the northwest coast of North America (but including a major diversion to London, England). Notions of place and belonging animate virtually all his projects. What, for example, does it mean to have an allegiance to a territory in the context of empire and settler colonialism? And how do the stories we tell about our shared pasts in place give meaning to our collective presents and potential futures? Whether writing about Seattle or London, ghosts or earthquakes, food or shipwrecks, Coll is concerned with crafting engaging narratives that examine place, power, and meaning.
Poetry Reading, The Wreck of the SS Valencia
Opening the event, we are pleased to feature a poetry reading of the heritage poem “The Wreck of the SS Valencia” by Doni Eve, which debuted at the museum’s 2025 Sooke Spook event, among several poems performed by Sooke Writers’ Collective authors.
About the Author: Doni Eve
DK Eve is a multiple award-winning poet and author inspired by the people and places of southern Vancouver Island in T’Sou-ke traditional territory. Her work is featured in eleven Sooke Writers’ Collective anthologies, the latest Writings from the Living Edge (Sooke Writers’ Collective, 2025) as well as Reflex Press (2022 UK), Archetype Journal (2022 Toronto), Miramichi Flash (2022 NB), Subjectiv journal (2021 Portland, OR), and many others.
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