Lucy Trimble, Eric Wright’s third Canadian detective series character, makes her second appearance in Death on the Rocks. Her debut in Death of a Sunday Writer saw the fifty-something small-town library worker and oppressed housewife start a new life and new career after inheriting a Toronto detective agency.

In this outing, Trimble’s live-in lover seems to be straying from the nest, but she is slowly finding her feet as a detective. She’s hired by Greta Golden, a local pottery store owner who wants to know why someone is probing around in her past. The culprit is a British private eye looking into an inheritance case dealing with the family of Golden’s father, who died 40 years earlier after falling off a cliff in Cornwall.

Golden had been told that her father had no living family, so the prospect of unknown relatives seems intriguing. Trimble agrees to travel to the U.K. to seek out relatives, but her quest is complicated by the British private eye who insists on joining her. Trimble’s persistence pays off as she unravels some well-concealed and almost forgotten schemes from Golden’s mother’s family.

Death on the Rocks is a laid-back, tangled tale that effectively chronicles the changes in the lives of everyday characters. As in Wright’s other novels, there is plenty of wry humour here, and an intriguing storyline supported by interesting secondary characters, lots of local colour, and many promising subplots. Wright also inserts several entertaining sequences featuring North Americans coping with their first trip to Britain, making for an entertaining read.