Liz Maguire's original plan was to take her mother Jill on a weekend trip to Rehoboth Beach for some much-needed rest and relaxation. Before she knew what was happening that simple beach weekend had morphed into a weeklong trip to Quebec, Canada for five women: Liz, Jill and Jill's sisters-in-law Patsy and Claire and her niece Karen. As the planned trip became longer and more complicated, Jill needed to bow out, and insisted that Martina, Luis's mysterious half-sister take her place. Although Liz was concerned about how well an outsider like Martina would fit in with the others, she reluctantly agreed.
The five women had barely arrived at the Chateau Frontenac when the trouble started. Liz decided to escape from the group by going for a swim in the hotel pool. There she found herself ensnared in a mess, not of her own making, involving a murder. The police were convinced that the murder victim had been involved in the drug trade, and suspected Liz of having international connections to that trade. Liz suffered a broken hip and possible concussion and ended up in a Quebec hospital. Had she fallen down the hotel's famous marble staircase or had she been pushed?
There were comedic aspects to the mess - the French dialect spoken in Quebec confounded Liz especially when the hotel room she said she was occupying showed no evidence that anyone had been there, she couldn't find her luggage and was missing some expensive jewelry, and she needed to explain having both a USA and a Colombian passport under different names.
Her husband Luis, busy chasing international criminals and meeting the financial challenges of his hacienda in Cartagena, was not answering Liz's phone calls. Liz found to her dismay that Martina knew more about her husband's whereabouts than she did. Martina kept disappearing and she also seemed to know far more about the victim of the murder than she let on. Was Martina involved in drug trafficking? Did she know the whereabouts of Liz's missing luggage and the jewelry it contained?
Liz was also concerned about her mother. She had planned the trip originally because Jill seemed rundown, overburdened with her husband's medical care. Could it be that Jill herself was also ill? If so, why did she feel the need to hide this from her only child? Also, Liz's ending up in the hospital meant leaving her children for far longer than the few days originally planned, and further burdening her mother with caring for them.
Then there was the ever so helpful - and handsome - Declan O'Toole. He claimed to be a second cousin of the Maguire's who had come to help straighten out Liz's problems with the Quebec Constabulary, but who was he really?
How Liz dealt with all these challenges forms the story of the Quebec Quintet, the fourth in the Liz Maguire series.
Mary Leach PhD is an octogenarian who has spent more than forty years in higher education, including the last twenty as a senior academic administrator at the medical campus of the University of Maryland in Baltimore. This is her first novel.
