📖First Chapter: Better Safe Than Sorry by Mike Martin #firstchapter

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Title: Better Safe Than Sorry

Author: Mike Martin

Publisher: Ottawa Press and Publishing

Publication Date: May 10, 2024

Pages: 251

Genre: Mystery

Winston Windflower is (sort of) enjoying his retirement from the RCMP in Grand Bank, Newfoundland, happily spending time with his young family, but feeling a little restless. Corporal Eddie Tizzard is running the Marystown detachment and struggling with the demands of the role while his own family grows. When a new kind of drug threatens the community, a body (the wrong body) is found dead in a hearse, and then another drug-connected mysterious death occurs, Tizzard knows he’s dealing with a deadly menace in their quiet, close-knit community.

Windflower finds himself inexorably (and not unhappily) drawn back into the action, first in an unofficial role to help snare the dealers and then back to active duty in a community that desperately needs his steady hand and good judgement.

Our favorite Mountie, Sgt. Windflower and his fellow courageous cops in small-town Grand Bank, Newfoundland are back to fight a new threat in this compelling page-turner. Award-winning author, Mike Martin once again brings us a stirring story, blending down-home Newfoundland charm with the warmth of family life.

You can pick up your copy at Amazon.

First Chapter:

Some say that April is the cruelest month, but Winston Windflower was pretty convinced that it was March. At least in Grand Bank, Newfoundland. They’d had a relatively mild winter up to this point but now they were getting slammed. Not once but twice. By winter storms that started the day before St. Patrick’s Day and were just ending now on March 19. The locals called the second storm “Sheila’s Brush” as a nickname given to a storm that seemed to occur right after Paddy’s Day. It came from an old Irish legend that claimed Sheila was the wife or sister or mother of St. Patrick and that this dumping of snow is a result of her sweeping away the old season of winter.

Supposedly, that was to prepare everyone for Spring, which the calendar said was about to begin in a week or so. But judging by the current weather and Windflower’s years of experience in Grand Bank, that new season was quite a way off. As he surveyed the banks of snow and checked the weather on his phone, there was more of the white stuff coming. He didn’t mind really. He actually liked the snow and living in this small town on the easternmost tip of Canada.

Until recently Windflower had been an RCMP Officer, a Mountie, but now was the Community Safety Officer for Grand Bank and a number of other surrounding communities. When the local RCMP detachment closed because of budgetary concerns, they needed someone to look after their local policing. The Mounties would look after the big stuff from nearby Marystown, about 40 minutes away, while they hoped Windflower would serve as a deterrent to local criminals who wanted to take advantage of the situation.

So far, so good on the crime front, thought Windflower who had actually spent most of his time doing outreach and crime prevention. In Marystown, however, things were not going so well. Windflower’s friend, Acting Inspector Eddie Tizzard, was the interim head of the larger detachment and he was really struggling with a number of recent crimes and a disgruntled workforce that had been short-staffed since forever.

They were now in almost daily rebellion and were refusing overtime which was the only way Tizzard could manage all the competing demands. He was at the end of his rope and had told his boss, Superintendent Ron Quigley, that he’d had enough, and he should find someone else to replace him. Quigley asked him to hang on, but that rope he was holding was pretty thin. It snapped with the latest incidents that crossed his desk.

First was a brazen armed robbery at a pharmacy in nearby Burin where three hooded men had forced the on-duty pharmacist to hand over a quantity of prescription narcotics. The men fled in a van that they’d recently stolen from a car lot and took off. By the time his officers had gotten there, they were long gone. They found the van hours later abandoned on a side road past the local nursery.

There was also a drug alert that had started in the city of St. John’s but now spread all across the island of Newfoundland. It warned of the presence of a new and potentially lethal drug concoction that was believed to have already caused two overdose deaths in the Bell Island area, near St John’s. Tizzard read it again. “Reports indicate that a combination of Fentanyl and Xanax, called Green Monsters, were in circulation across the province. The tablets which are green have been made to look like Oxy 80’s, a popular name of Oxycontin. They are extremely dangerous and increase the risk of overdose for anyone using them.”

“Just what we need,” Tizzard murmured to himself as he called his Executive Assistant Terri Pilgrim into his office.

“Terri, can you make copies of this for everyone and make sure that it gets posted everywhere around town? Send it over to Windflower in Grand Bank, too, Thank you.”

“No problem,” said his assistant. “But there’s someone here who insists on seeing you.”

“Who is it?” asked Tizzard.

“It’s the guy from Mitchelmore’s Funeral Home,” said Pilgrim.

“What does he want?” asked Tizzard. That’s when his bad day got a whole lot worse.

Frank Mitchelmore claimed that the body in his hearse was not the one he expected. He had sent his hearse and driver over to North Sydney to pick up a deceased person and when his man came back, they discovered that it wasn’t the late George Dollimont. Not even close. It was a woman. Young, beautiful, and very dead. He wanted to know what the RCMP was going to do about this outrage. Tizzard nodded and did the only thing he could think of at that time. He called Terri Pilgrim and asked her to bring them both a cup of tea.

Windflower, on the other hand, was having a very good day. He had few worries and his family life was just about perfect. His wife, Sheila Hillier, no relation to the character or temperament of the lady from Sheila’s Brush, was moving her business to the next level. Literally. She had developed a co-op of local suppliers who were making Newfoundland crafts and clothing and shipping them all over Canada. She was taking over a section of the old Marystown Shipyard that had fallen into disuse and was going to use it as a warehouse and shipping hub. She was over there today, in fact, to look over the premises, and if all went well, to sign a lease.

Windflower’s two daughters were at school. Stella, the six and half year old was going to Grade One in Fortune while four-year-old Amelia Louise was in a pilot junior kindergarten program in Marystown. It was a bit of a commute for such young children, but she was on a minibus with six or seven other kids from Grand Bank and was quite happy to be grown up enough to travel by school bus. Today, Sheila would pick her up before she headed back.

His only concern, and he knew that this was a first world problem, was that he was bored at work. He knew he shouldn’t complain, and he wouldn’t tell anybody this, but he missed being a police officer. It was, after all, what he had done since he was a teenager. First, with the tribal police in his home community of Pink Lake in Northern Alberta, and then as an RCMP officer in British Columbia and Nova Scotia and for over 10 years in Grand Bank.

But that was over now. He thought he wouldn’t miss it, but after less than a year as Community Safety Officer he had already run out of ideas to keep the kids entertained and out of trouble and he certainly didn’t enjoy the small talk he had to make every week with the mayors who were his bosses. He wasn’t ready to pack it in, but he knew it wasn’t enough.

Someone who definitely had enough was Eddie Tizzard. After calming down the funeral home guy by assuring him that the Mounties would investigate, he was now dealing with the irate Deputy Mayor of Marystown, Brian Hodder, who was screaming at him about a traffic light, the only traffic light in Marystown, being out for the last two days. Tizzard explained that the roads crew were waiting on a replacement bulb that was coming from St. John’s, but that did not slow down Hodder one bit.

Finally, he really did have enough. He stood up from behind his desk and pointed at the door. “Get out,” he said.

“What did you say?” asked Hodder. “You can’t talk to me like that. We pay your salary.”

“Get out before I throw you out,” said Tizzard, his voice barely under control.

Hodder started yelling again but quickly turned heels when Tizzard started walking towards him.

“You’re a witness,” said Hodder to a startled Terri Pilgrim who was about to come in with more tea. “He is threatening me. I’ll have your badge for this,” he said to Tizzard as his parting shot before storming out of his office.

“That went well,” said Pilgrim. “Want some more tea?”

“No thank you, Terri,” said Tizzard. “But can you get me Superintendent Quigley? I need to talk to him before Hodder gets to him.”

About the Author:

Mike Martin was born in St. John’s, NL on the east coast of Canada and now lives and works in Ottawa, Ontario. He is a long-time freelance writer and his articles and essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines and online across Canada as well as in the United States and New Zealand.

He is the award-winning author of the best-selling Sgt. Windflower Mystery series, set in beautiful Grand Bank. There are now 14 books in this light mystery series with the publication of Better Safe Than Sorry.

Mike is Past Chair of the Board of Crime Writers of Canada, a national organization promoting Canadian crime and mystery writers and a member of the Newfoundland Writers’ Guild and Capital Crime Writers.

His latest book is the mystery, Better Late Than Never.

Author Links

Website | Facebook | X (Twitter)

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