After-Image: A Vicky Bauer Mystery - Hardcover

Gom, Leona

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312145373 ISBN 13: 9780312145378

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1996

Synopsis

Of mixed native and white heritage, fiercely independent, and a graduate student in film studies, Vicky Bauer is far from the perfect wife for a schoolteacher working on a Canadian armed forces base in Germany. Vicky has had the occasional minor scrape with military authorities, as well as an on-again, off-again drinking problem.
So when Vicky claims she has seen a woman murdered, and the corpse cannot be found, nobody believes her. Instead, they think she has imagined the whole episode - especially that the killer wore an armed forces uniform.
But Vicky begins to uncover a complex web of secrets, illegal activities, and plausible motives for murder. Suspects include her own husband, seemingly a bit too protective of their racist landlord. There is also the base doctor who likes to keep military "dependents" like Vicky tranquilized; the soldier harboring a career-destroying secret; and the investigating lieutenant, suspiciously eager to dismiss Vicky's claims.
When drug dealing, political extremism, and homophobia become parts of the puzzle, Vicky realizes she is not simply a witness, but maybe the next target.

About this title

About the Author:

About the Author: Leona Gom is a West Coast writer, poet and former university instructor, and the author of the Vicky Bauer Mystery series. Her novels, poems and short stories have been published in England, Europe, the US, Australia and New Zealand. Two of her plays have been produced for radio in North America. Born in rural Alberta, she now lives in White Rock, British Columbia.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Vicky Bauer, part American Indian, lives with her much older, German-born husband Conrad near the Canadian Army base at Lahr, Germany. Conrad is an exchange teacher at an Army school; Vicky struggles to write her M.A. thesis on women in filmdom and to stay off the booze that's earned her a reputation as unreliable. One day, stopping to take pictures driving a bicycle ride through the woods, Vicky sees a man in an army uniform shoot his companion--a blond woman wearing a pearl-embroidered sweater. No body or blood traces are found by the military police, to whom Vicky reports the incident. Meanwhile, Andrew Pilski, a captain married to Annie, Vicky's best friend and confidante, promises, perfunctorily, to investigate. Conrad, whose German roots seem to be unpleasantly asserting themselves, appears detached, even when someone drives a car into Vicky, on her bike, causing minor injuries. There will be an unsigned threatening note, a stolen photograph, Vicky's sighting of another woman wearing an identical sweater to the murdered woman's at the same spot in the woods, and a lot more, before Vicky, her life on the line, is saved in a last-second rescue that raises more questions than it answers. A troubled prickly heroine whose musings run the psychobabble gamut in a competently written story by Gom (The Y Chromosome, not reviewed) with a downbeat aura and an unhackneyed background more compelling than its convoluted plot. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0312145373
• ISBN 13: 9780312145378
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 257