A murder mystery that this summer won top-tier recognition in the Sunshine Coast Book Awards broadens the brooding style of West Coast noir to encompass an astute study of relationships in small communities.
Gibsons resident Charlotte Morganti published Breaking News: Local Heiress Dead this year, and netted first prize in the category of Sunshine Coast Voices in the literary awards sponsored by the Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society.
She has previously published a book of seven “cozy mysteries” (starring a perspicacious florist named Persimmon Branch Worthing) and The End Game, a detective novel set in a rough town in B.C.’s Interior. End Game was itself nominated this year for the Crime Writers of Canada’s 2024 Award of Excellence for Best Crime First Novel.
“Winning the [Coast Voices] award really helped my confidence level,” said Morganti, a former attorney in the finance and mining sector. “I suffer from the imposter syndrome, like just about every other writer I know. Some part of me says: somebody is going to email me and say you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
Morganti proactively countermanded criticism by conducting extensive research for Local Heiress Dead. She set her tale in the fictional town of Prospect, near California’s real-life Donner Lake. When she and her husband visited nearby Reno, she drove to neighbouring Truckee to interview police officers. “The captain of operations sat down with me and he got really into the story,” she recalled. “Then he asked me, what lake are you thinking of?”
The officer shot down Morganti’s scheme to set the action at Lake Tahoe, because criminal investigation would cross jurisdictional lines and involve the United States Coast Guard. “He steered me towards Donner Lake,” Morganti explained. “And then he started talking about all of the different issues that they come up with when they’re policing a town that attracts both tourists and seasonal residents, with conflicts involving the locals.”
Donner Lake is named for the ill-fated Donner Party, a group of wagon train migrants who in the winter of 1846-1847 became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains and resorted to cannibalism for survival.
Local Heiress Dead introduces an investigative reporter with an appetite for trenchant journalism: Olivia Mercier, who becomes a prime suspect in the death of her friend Shauna Wylie after a body is discovered in a barrel of concrete. Olivia has motive (she stands to inherit her friend’s fortune; her husband was seduced by Shauna’s wiles) and a way with newsprint. She is a writer for the local Gazette, perceptually racing an anonymous blog for scoops. When typing Shauna’s obituary, she savours apposite reportage favoured of ink-stained muckrakers: “[Shauna’s] love of animals extended to the underdog.”
Morganti drew on her student experience of writing for the Ubyssey campus weekly and interrogated a friend with newspaper experience for insights.
The plot unfolded as she composed it. “Shauna was going to be a woman that maybe deserved what she got,” Morganti said, “and then as I started putting more about the relationship between Shauna and Olivia in the book, the more I liked Shauna, and the more upset I was that I was actually killing her off.”
The story is uniquely told from Olivia’s first-person perspective; initially shackled as a suspect, she then becomes determined to unmask the true perpetrator. At every step in the chase, her nuanced connections with fellow community members (and her personal history) compound the plot’s verisimilitude.
“I’ve discovered I use mystery as a way of getting into the bigger story about people’s lives and their relationships,” said Morganti. “It’s like a device to tell a story that might otherwise be a romance or women’s fiction or something along those lines. Those are the mysteries that I enjoy the most: where you discover all kinds of things about the victim and the townspeople.”
Breaking News: Local Heiress Dead is the first in a planned series of novels. “I like Olivia and her snarkiness,” added Morganti, “and thought I could have so much fun with these characters.” The book is available for purchase from Sunshine Coast booksellers and online at Amazon.
