A woman who loves cats but hates people, a greedy brother-in-law and gold-digging sister, pregnant middle-class teenagers needing some remedy for their unfortunate state – these are a few of the secondary characters Gwendolyn Southin deploys to support Margaret Spencer’s introduction to Canadian mystery.

In Death in a Family Way, the first in a planned series of novels starring the likable and feisty Spencer, character is almost more important than plot. While the flow of the book is smooth, the action well paced, and the plot well thought out, all of it is slightly on the predictable side. That’s not the greatest sin; far more important to build characters and set scenes that give the author room to explore human foibles. That’s surely just as likely to compel readers to keep up with the series.

Margaret Spencer wakes up on the morning of her 50th birthday, looks across the table at her husband, Harry, and thinks, there’s got to be more to life than this. It’s 1950s Vancouver, and as the wife of a lawyer, she’s lived a white-bread and sterile existence. Flaunting convention and her very proper family, she decides to take a part-time job as a receptionist in a one-man detective agency. Her boss, Nat Southby, is a rumpled guy with a soft heart, desperately in need of someone to whip him, and the agency, into shape. Together, he and Margaret form a team reminiscent of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and Della Street, but with a very modern feel – Margaret and Nat are far more vulnerable and human than Perry and Della ever were.

Southin is smart to make the context the 1950s; it allows her to deal with the ways in which men and women relate to each other, but with a bit of ironic distance. This allows her to explore modern relationships without coming across as overly earnest. It’ll be interesting to see where she takes these characters; hopefully, now that they’ve been introduced successfully, the plots will take a turn for the sophisticated.