LR Wright Books in Order

If you want to sample her crime fiction in order: The Suspect → Sleep While I Sing → A Chill Rain in January.
If you like following one relationship arc: Fall from Grace → Prized Possessions → A Touch of Panic → Mother Love → Strangers Among Us → Acts of Murder.
If you prefer a female lead in uniform: Acts of Murder → Kidnap → Menace.
If you enjoy character driven literary novels: Neighbours → The Favorite → Among Friends → Love in the Temperate Zone.

L.R. Wright was born Laurali Rose Appleby in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan on June 5, 1939. From an early age she was called Bunny, a nickname her father chose before she was born and one that followed her through life and into many tributes.

She grew up in Saskatoon and in Abbotsford, British Columbia, in a family of teachers. As a teenager she spent several years in Germany when her father took a posting at a Canadian army base school. His sudden death there brought the family back to Canada, and the mix of places and losses would quietly shape the emotional weather of her fiction.

Wright studied at Carleton University, the University of Calgary and the University of British Columbia, but her path was not straight to books. In the early 1960s she went to the UBC Summer School of Theatre and joined Holiday Theatre, a touring company for young audiences. There she met director and actor John Wright. They married in 1962 and eventually had two daughters, Katey and Johnna.

Acting gave way to journalism. Through the late 1960s and 1970s Wright worked as a reporter and editor in Saskatoon and Calgary, eventually becoming an assistant city editor. The work was busy and practical, but she wanted more time for stories of her own. A stint at the Banff School of Fine Arts, where novelist W.O. Mitchell encouraged her, helped her make the leap to full time writing in the late 1970s.

Her first novels were not mysteries at all but intimate, character driven stories. Neighbours looks at three women whose ordinary suburban lives mask deep isolation and mental strain. The Favorite follows Sarah Griffin as she grieves a difficult father and tries to understand why their love curdled into conflict. In Among Friends and Love in the Temperate Zone, Wright writes about friendship, marriage, sex and middle aged reinvention with a clear eye and a quiet sense of humor.

Crime entered almost by accident. While working on a new book she found herself writing about an elderly man who has just killed his neighbour. That story became The Suspect, the first novel featuring Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and town librarian Cassandra Mitchell. Set in the small coastal community of Sechelt on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast, it won the Edgar Award for best novel in 1986, making Wright the first Canadian to receive that prize.

Over the next decade she wrote a run of Alberg mysteries including Sleep While I Sing, A Chill Rain in January, Fall from Grace, Prized Possessions, A Touch of Panic, Mother Love, Strangers Among Us and Acts of Murder. The books focus less on puzzles and more on why people do harm to one another, blending police work with careful portraits of families, neighbours and drifters whose lives intersect in unsettling ways. A Chill Rain in January and Mother Love both earned Arthur Ellis Awards, and Mother Love also received a major Canadian fiction prize usually reserved for so called literary novels.

As the Karl Alberg series drew to a close, Wright shifted the spotlight to a new Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, Edwina “Eddie” Henderson. First seen working alongside Alberg in Acts of Murder, Henderson later leads the detachment herself in Kidnap and Menace, carrying the Sunshine Coast setting into a new century and giving readers a different, female lens on small town policing.

Alongside her novels, Wright kept learning and teaching. She completed a master’s degree in Liberal Studies at Simon Fraser University, taught writing through the University of British Columbia and in workshops, and adapted several of her books for radio and screen. She was active in writers’ organizations and was a steady presence in the Canadian crime writing community.

Wright died of breast cancer in Vancouver on February 25, 2001, not long after remarrying John Wright, with whom she had remained close. New editions and a later television crime drama based on her Sunshine Coast mysteries have brought her work to readers who were not yet born when The Suspect appeared.

Her books return again and again to ordinary people whose lives tilt suddenly out of alignment, and to the question of how much we can ever really know about those who live across the street or share our bed.