Her Mountie and Her Keyboard

Medway, Alberta, is a small fictional town and the setting of Marina Endicott’s The Observer. Julia Carey is the narrator; her partner, Hardy Willis, has accepted a position in the local Royal Canadian Mounted Police division. “Medway meant nothing to either of us,” Julia explains, “but we looked it up on my big Rand McNally as we zoomed along, and I stuck my finger on the spot, a tiny town on the Alaska Highway northeast of Edmonton.”

Although comparisons will inevitably be made between this novel and Sinclair Ross’s 1941 classic, As for Me and My House, with its ambiguous female narrator, Julia is a devoted partner, trying to fathom the duties of her Mountie: “There were a lot of rules that I did not yet know or understand. In the two months we’d been here, over and over I had leaped to a conclusion only to discover that I’d been wrong or misinformed, or prejudiced by...