Publishers often promote new mysteries on the strength of the unique, quirky vocations of their protagonists. There are dog-groomer detectives and mysteries featuring caterers, couriers, and clowns. But only a Canadian writer would base a mystery series on the work of a female investigator for the federal government’s National Council for Science and Technology.

The job title may sound dry and bureaucratic, but Cold Dark Matter, the second Morgan O’Brien mystery, delivers a tight, complex plot and a trustworthy heroine. The pacing makes you want to race ahead and solve the puzzles that author Alex Brett lays out so well. She introduces a large cast of secondary characters, all well drawn and believable. Her bad guys are seriously scary. The fact that many of the events in the novel really did happen in the not-too-distant past adds another level of interest to an already multilayered story.

Cold Dark Matter begins with a death, the apparent suicide of a Canadian astronomer working at a telescope station in Hawaii. O’Brien is dispatched to Hawaii to find the astronomer’s missing research diaries. She senses there’s something off about this job from the get-go, and she’s right.

Her investigation is fiercely opposed by the Canadian staff at the observatory, and she quickly realizes she has no support from the Ministry of Industry and Science, which sent her there. Soon she’s in physical danger. As the pieces slowly fall into place, O’Brien and the reader realize that this story is about much more than the death of a depressed astronomer. He is but the loose thread that when pulled can destroy a fabric of lies, shame, and government cover-ups reaching back decades to the fear and paranoia of the Cold War era.

Screenwriters are admonished to open a scene as late as possible – open with the gunshot, for example, instead of the argument that precedes it – and that’s what Brett has done throughout this novel. Her first novel, Dead Water Creek, was good but not always well paced. By speeding up the action and dropping the reader into the middle of each scene instead of the beginning, she has made Cold Dark Matter that much better than her debut.