These days, there are few books that just grab me
and don’t let go. Seldom Seen Road: Burnt River Mysteries by John
Degen is one of those books. Maybe because I identified so closely to the
central character, Mark Roth. His grief and his isolation very much hit home
for this reader.
Life often happens in unplanned and devesting ways.
Living in the isolated cabin on the north shore of Lake Huron was planned, in a
way. After all, they had bought the cabin and planned to live there a lot once
Mark retired. The two of them aging day by day together. He never contemplated
the unthinkable. Mark never planned on being a widower.
But, he is.
Sara is gone and he spends a lot of his waking time
at the cabin drinking in isolation. His
life has closed down to visits with a police cousin who patrols the area,
fishing, baseball games, an occasional phone call or visit with their academic daughter,
and all the booze one man alone can drink. Their daughter, Stephanie, is a criminalist
and college professor living many hours away in Thunder Bay. He is a lonely man
living at a very isolated cabin deep in the woods and locked in a world of
grief and loss.
As the book opens, Mark Roth is out in his boat and
fishing as the night begins to overtake Lake Huron. By way of his hearing aids,
a Bluetooth connection, and his cellphone, he is listening to the visiting Toronto
Blue Jays take on the Cleveland Indians at the stadium several hundred miles to
the south. It is a nice night and he is deeply focused on the game and the
images he sees of it by way of the audio byplay.
It is only when he can no longer see his bobber
floating in the darkness, and can easily see the lights of a large tanker
coming far too close for his very small craft, that he decides it is time to go
back to the shore. He reels his last cast in, fires up the boat motor and
running lights, and swivels in his seat to look at the nearby shoreline and the
lights of the very small town.
It is only then that he sees the strobing lights of
at least eleven emergency vehicles lined up around the mouth of the river as
well as numerous more flying down the Trans-Canada Highway at high speed. Something
very bad has happened and he realizes he can also hear sirens like crazy. The
small town of Burnt River is hopping tonight.
He heads back in to the marina where he rented the
boat earlier and finds the owner, Madeline Colby. She says somebody was found
in the water, tangled up in the roots of a tree on her shoreline. A kid at the
local diner saw the man and freaked out. Soon, Mark’s cousin, Constable Jeremy
Roth, was first on the scene and jumped into the cold waters to rescue the guy.
Not that he actually needed to do that as the man
had been long dead by the time Jeremy got to him. And it wasn’t just a few
minutes dead either. Snagged in the limbs of a fallen tree, the dead man had
very live lamprey eels feeding off his face. From the way the body appears,
somebody murdered the man, and then came here to dump the body. The killer or
killers most likely expected the body to drift out into the cold deep waters of
Lake Huron to never be seen again. So much for that.
Who is this man and why was he murdered?
Identifying the dead is the easy part. Why it
happened and who did it is a puzzler. Mark Roth has considerable interest as
his cousin, Jeremy, is involved thanks to his actions. Constable Jeremy Roth
may be on the outside of the case looking in, for a variety of reasons, but he
does have some access, and Mark wants all the details.
If Stephanie had her way, her dad would abandon the
isolated cabin and move to her in Thunder Bay or in a home somewhere where he
wasn’t alone. She worries. She always did, but it is way worse with her mom
gone and how her dad is in the aftermath. She is very aware that her dad is
doing little more than marking time. The last thing she wants is for him to
start poking around at the fringes of a murder.
Yet, that case seems to be the one thing that gets
her retired dad going a bit. His life was in music, not police work. But, he is
very interested and wants to bounce case ideas off of her despite the fact that
she is an academic and not an actual investigator. A part of her, whether she
truly wants to admit it, interests her as well. A murder like this just does not
happen in Burnt River.
Yet, it did.
That murder is just the start of things in this
complicated and highly atmospheric mystery read. Shifting in point of view to
follow Mark, Jeremy, Stephanie, and others, the case gets bigger and bigger.
Quite a lot is going on in these characters lives and even more is going on
outside them. The woods may be lovely, dark, and deep. But they hold a lot of menace
and violence as well.
Billed as the first book in the Burnt River
Mysteries series, the foundation is well laid in Seldom Seen Road.
The read is strongly recommended.
Make sure you read the author’s guest post on
setting, Is
that a real place?, at Kings River Life Magazine.
Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/4wY3xCO
John Degan’s website: https://www.jkdegen.com/
My digital ARC reading copy came from the publisher, Latitude 46 Publishing, through
NetGalley, with no expectation of a positive review.
Kevin R. Tipple ©2026
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