Read excerpt

After the recent death of her artist husband, it's not all raisins and almonds in the relocated and refurbished consulting room of Dr. Rebecca Temple in downtown Toronto. There was nothing in Rebecca's past to prepare her for the headlong lethal drama that walked innocently into her waiting room in the guise of harmless old Goldie Kochinsky. From Goldie, Dr. Temple learned, to her pain, that even paranoids have enemies. With the unrelenting pace of a jack-hammer, the suspense and horror combine to keep the pressure on full, while Argentine heavies and a relentless murderer stop at nothing in their attempts to keep the lid on a whole Pandora's box of secrets going back to the death camps of Poland in the Second World War. This is the sort of novel that sells the sequel as you turn the pages of the present most accomplished introduction.
 

"...To Die in Spring is Torontonian Sylvia Warsh's first published mystery and it's a good deal better than the work of many veterans. It's also set up as a kickoff to a promising series featuring Dr. Rebecca Temple, a young widow recovering from the early death of her beloved artist husband.
...The novel is set in 1979, which puts it in temporal reach of the Second World War as well as the horrors of Argentina, where many Nazis and some surviving Jews fled after the war. Warsh handles fairly deftly the now-historical issues, putting them into the terms and mouths of characters who display the full range of greed and obsession required to play out her plot.
...Warsh, who teaches creative writing to seniors in Toronto, does a fine job of unwrapping mysterious identities until both sins and crimes lie satisfactorily revealed."