Seeing Is Deceiving - Softcover

North, Suzanne

3.36

28 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0771068069 ISBN 13: 9780771068065

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 1997

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Seeing is Deceiving is Suzanne North’s second Phoebe Fairfax mystery, and it more than delivers on the promise of the first. The sardonic Phoebe and Candi Sinclair, her apparently ditzy colleague at the TV program “A Day in the Lifestyle,” are back, this time in New Age territory.

Phoebe and Candi are filming at the Okotoks Psychic Fair when one of the exhibitors, the sleazy Jonathan Webster, collapses. A few hours later he is dead – poisoned (in a rather extreme way) – and the police immediately suspect his common-law wife, Tracy, of murder. The fractured bones and bruises Webster has dealt her over the years give her ample motive. Frightened, Tracy turns to her old friend Candi for help, and Candi is off sleuthing to clear Tracy’s name, dragging Phoebe along reluctantly in her wake.

Phoebe’s filmmaking efforts and her unenthusiastic crusade to prove Tracy’s innocence take her into the fantastic world of fortune-tellers and pet channellers, to the race track, and through the foothills to the icy Sheep River. En route she encounters an ensemble of odd and delightful characters, including Maud Gellman, who’s suing the Queen for a wrong done to her in a past life, Two Bob, a retired but not retiring bookie, and Sadie Nightingale, wilderness gardener and card-reader extraordinaire.

Fast-pased, wickedly funny, and with a twisty ending that will make readers cheer, this second Phoebe Fairfax mystery demonstrates that, sometimes, seeing really is deceiving.

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About the Author:

Suzanne North was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, and now lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Before she began writing mysteries, she wrote for magazines, for CBC Television, and scripted a number of documentary movies. She has also worked variously as a bibliographic searcher, a waitress, a television announcer, and a professional horse player. The Phoebe Fairfax mysteries are probably the only crime novels in Canada written on a computer purchased with the author’s race-track winnings.

Suzanne North is married to arachnologist Donald Buckle and shares her home with him and thirty thousand dead spiders.
From the Hardcover edition.

From School Library Journal:

YA--Phoebe Fairfax is not a sleuth by choice. Sent to cover a psychic fair for the TV program "A Day in the Life Style," Phoebe (a camerawoman) and colleague Candi Sinclair (anchor for the program) become caught up in the murder of exhibitor Jonathan Webster. The obvious suspect is Webster's girl friend, Tracy. A former classmate and friend of Candi's, Tracy appeals to the two women to help her clear her name. Filmmaking, racetracks, fortune-telling, and the foothills of the Canadian Rockies provide the backdrops against which this novel takes place, and it is this atmosphere, as much as the plot, that makes this novel an engaging one.

Pamela B. Rearden, Centreville Regional Library, Fairfax County, VA

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