Interview with Joan Donaldson-Yarmey
author of Illegally Dead

To the standard writerly advice "write what you know," Joan Donaldson-Yarmey could add "write where you've been." That's what she's done and the result is Illegally Dead, a fast-paced and totally captivating whodunit that could only be set in Western Canada.

Though she currently lives on Vancouver Island, Donaldson-Yarmey has lived in rural areas and small towns throughout Alberta and British Columbia, and, as the author of seven travel books celebrating Western Canada, she knows whereof she writes.

Her protagonist Elizabeth Oliver is also a travel writer.

"I had her write travel because I figure I know about that," she says. "It would save me doing a lot of research on some sort of other occupation that I know nothing about."

Elizabeth is exploring Alberta's Crowsnest Highway for a travel article when her travels take her down a road, where moments earlier, parts of what is undeniably a human skeleton have been fished out of an unused septic tank. As she researches her magazine piece, Elizabeth is inexorably drawn into a web of stories of lost loves, lost fathers, and small town politics. But by the time a second body is found, she thinks she has found the thread that leads to the centre of the web. Or has she?

The idea for the book came to her, Donaldson-Yarmey says, when she heard of a body being found in a rural septic tank. "I've always loved to read mysteries. Some are terrible and you think, oh, I could do better than that. So one day I decided to prove that I could."

Elizabeth likes to read mysteries too and, like Donaldson-Yarmey, she also works as a nursing attendant. That's pretty much where the similarities end though. Elizabeth, she says, is a bit younger than her creator and probably a bit more adventurous. If a dead body turned up in her path, would she jump in with both feet and try to solve the mystery? Donaldson-Yarmey is not sure. "It's easy to slowly be able to plot what she will do as opposed to having to make a split second decision as to what I would do. Would I be scared and take off? Would I try to solve it? I have no idea what my reaction would be. Maybe I'd have moved someplace else!"

Travel and mystery turned out to be such a good mix that a sequel for Illegally Dead is already in the works. Like its predecessor, it will be set in rural Western Canada, an area that Elizabeth and Donaldson-Yarmey want to tell the world about. "I really enjoyed travel writing," says Donaldson-Yarmey. "I wanted to show we had something here worth looking at."