This is the second book in the Russell Teed series, set in Montréal during the 1950s. Teed is sent to New York City, where he’s immediately given money and a plane ticket back to Montréal. His client, Anne Wedgewood, has never known who her father was, but she does know he will be on that plane, and she wants Teed to figure out who he is. The flight’s a bumpy one, and one of the passengers ends up dead before they get back to Dorval Airport. But was that Anne’s father? Teed’s work is only just beginning, and it’s only going to get more violent as he gets closer to the truth…

This book is better than the first, Crime on Cote des Neiges, but not as good as I remember The Body on Mount Royal to be. The story moves along more quickly than the first book, and I always get a kick out of the 1950s setting. And the fatal flight had me practically bouncing in my chair with glee, because I was nerding out over the old-school commercial airline. However, there is a breathtakingly sexist sentence in this book that really had no business being there, and some of the remarks about black characters were cringe-inducing. The publisher does provide a disclaimer at the beginning of the book (this is a reprint of the 1952 edition), saying that they’ve removed typos but retained the attitudes of the period because that’s what happened. And yet there were a lot of typos. If that’s them “removing” typos, I’d hate to think what an uncorrected version looked like.

This book does mention events in Crime on Cote des Neiges, so if you like to read series in order, you may wish to start there. ( )