The Truth You're Told by Michael J Clark

​The legendary Canadian niceness is so potent that at times it carries right into their fiction. Such was the case here in this appealing mystery that managed to remain surprisingly low key despite decidedly high stakes.
         Somewhere around Manitoba/Winnipeg area there’s a lovely lake and a surrounding lake community. Places regular people live and/or come to vacation and a fancy lodge for those with Donald Duck kinda moolah. Sam, the novel’s protagonist, definitely one of the former ones, after being freshly laid off, comes to the lake to stay in her family cabin and try to write the Great Canadian novel. She’s got her friends (people she’s known from childhood) around also has her teenage kid come visit for the summer mother/daughter quality time. It’s a fun summer, though she hasn’t written a word.
           What Sam instead gets preoccupied with is the past, specifically the fate of her father, a local accountant (or was he) who died in a fire in 1989. And thus Sam ends up entangled in a local (and all kinds of murderous) conspiracy that goes back decades, so much so that her very life and the life of her daughter might be in danger. It turns out the truth Sam’s always been told is quite far from the real thing.
           Overall, this was a nice (I know, that word again) character driven small town mystery with a likeable cast and very decent writing. Not the thriller to light the world on fire, too mild mannered for that somehow (even when deadly) but a perfectly good read in its own right and goes by quickly too. Thanks Netgalley.