Tip of the Halo

ISBN 13: 978-1-896300-39-9
256 pages, paperback
Spring 2001

Mystery

> reader's guide
> related titles

about this book

The offices of the Catholic School Board in the fairly quiet community of St. Michael, near Edmonton, seem an unlikely locale for a murder investigation, but when the body of a senior administrator is found in the library, Staff Sergeant Dan Laurenson is on the scene. The murder investigation centres around a Western Canadian school board office in the throes of budget cuts and massive restructuring—and, as Laurenson quickly discovers, amid a dark underground of sex, lies and jealousy. In Tip of the Halo there is much more at stake than discovering how someone could be murdered in a busy office in broad daylight without anyone noticing—or hearing a sound.

Tip of the Halo is the first book in a series; the second book, Beyond Spite, was released in Spring 2002.

reader's guide

Tip of the Halo: The Post-Mortem
R.F. Darion discusses the writing of Tip of the Halo

The inspiration

I was driven to write Tip of the Halo after reading L.R. Wright's The Suspect, which I'd read as slowly as possible, suspecting that I'd never find another book like it.  When even L.R. Wright didn't write another like it, I set out to create a protagonist of my own as real and genuine as Wright's.

Writing anonymously

Partly because I was known under my own name for writing young adult novels, and partly because I had worked in the milieu featured in Tip of the Halo, I wrote not only under a pseudonym but anonymously as well.  This caused NeWest Press some unexpected difficulty because reviewers were reluctant to spend time on a project without a "human-interest angle."

Writing under a pseudonym

When I dropped the anonymity for the publication of my sequel, Beyond Spite, there was a lot more interest.  Sure enough, reviewers found a human-interest angle they liked, one which focused on my being a grandmother and my book being about a serial rapist.  Beyond Spite is, of course, about catching a serial rapist (and about sexual politics), but it's also about how a 45-year-old RCMP Staff Sergeant is changed by falling in love.

Research

Little research was required to write about murder in a tense work environment beset by job cut-backs and office politics; before writing about rape, however, I did a lot of reading on the subject. 

Since I come from a family where police stories have been told in abundance—sometimes using the actual wording of a police report or a judge's ruling—I had sufficient background information to write police procedurals with reasonable verisimilitude. I did, however, want to verify details so they would be correct for an Alberta RCMP detachment in 1995.  I dreaded calling around in search of a source of information because one thing my father and grandfather had made clear to me was that questions are almost always resented unless asked with great tact.  That was why, on my very first call, I immediately qualified my request for information by saying, "I just want to check out very basic details, like what you call your Staff Sergeant."  When the constable on the other end of the line laughed and said, "To his face, or behind his back?" I knew I'd hit it lucky beyond my wildest dreams.  And, indeed, everything I was told at our subsequent interview was so valuable that it was used in one way or another in the book. 

Choosing between Tip of the Halo and Beyond Spite

When asked, I recommend potential readers choose between novels in the Dan Laurenson Series on the basis of what kind of mystery they prefer.  Tip of the Halo is a classic puzzle mystery, the question at its crux being, "How could the victim have disappeared for so long in such a busy work environment?"  In contrast, Beyond Spite is primarily about police tactics in investigating serial rapists, thus it contains more action and jeopardy.  Of course, since Spite takes up where Halo leaves off, anyone planning to read both would do well to read them in the order they were written. Because I read mysteries for the fun of solving them, I've made a point of writing mysteries for readers to solve.  Instead of sprinkling red herrings about, I concentrated on making all the relevant facts available.