THE MYSTERIES by Robert McGill

A young woman disappears from a small town in northern Ontario.  The author teases at the knot that holds the mystery together until it is loosened and each strand adds a detail or two.

Robert is a young traveller who finds himself in the small Ontario town of Sunshine, in the middle of a party at the town's wildlife park.  A stranger has given him a yellow notebook and told him to deliver it to an Alice Pedersen. But Alice Pedersen disappeared two years ago.

Six months before Robert's arrival, human remains have been recovered from the local shoreline.  Stoddard Fremlin, the hockey coach, has been arrested on suspicion of murder.  Daniel Barrie, who was having an affair with Alice and who left for England immediately after her disappearance, has suddenly returned.  Rocket de Witt, a rising hockey star with deep secrets of his own and one of the last people to see Alice alive, has left town. Amid all this, there is a tiger on the loose.

Throw in the wildlife park owner who may have built his animal sanctuary on sacred native burial grounds, an eccentric hoarder and an insurance investigator who may be getting a little too personal with this case and you have an absorbing read that kept me engaged to the very end. Told from the perspective of several of the townsfolk, the mystery of Alice's disappearance slowly unravels, at the same time revealing the dark and carefully kept secrets of the inhabitants of Sunshine.