Barbara Crossie, a 31-year-old relationships columnist, has been invited by her friend Harry to join a Canadian delegation to China. She agrees, on condition that they meet up with her agent, Josh, who also happens to be her long-distance lover. But things go awry on arrival when Josh simply doesn’t appear. Barbara carries on with her companions, travelling the Silk Road and eventually finding herself in the deadliest desert on earth.
The setting for Linda Leith’s second novel, The Tragedy Queen, is beautiful Pointe-Claire, Quebec. Vince Carlson has just breezed into this bedroom community on his Harley-Davidson to install himself in a rented house, like a fox among the chickens. A disbarred lawyer and professional fraud artist, Vince is well known to the police, and the ladies of Pointe-Claire are about to meet a man quite different from their husbands, who return home every weekday on the 5:16 commuter train.
Budapest, 1990. A year of tumultuous change. But the perils of the public life are nothing compared to the perils of the private.
“A woman’s life is often complicated in ways that a man’s life is not. And, however complicated the circumstances, a woman’s life is complicated in ways that one woman may have common with other women and is less likely to have in common with a man.”
— Linda Leith, The Girl from Dream City