Speak for the Dead

by Amy Tector

Coroner Cate Spencer has been called to the scene of a death — a young woman has been found hanging in a claustrophobic, vault-like room with a rope around her neck.

The dead woman is Molly Johnson, an employee at Dominion Archives in Ottawa. This building, in the east end of the city, is an isolated storage facility for highly flammable photographic negatives dating from the 1960s. Molly was one of two archivists who have spent the past month sorting and packing the negatives in preparation for closing the facility. Now she’s dead.

Cate’s job is to determine the manner of death. Police Detective Dominic Baker is impatient for her ruling: he doesn’t need or want another homicide case, and he insists Molly obviously committed suicide.

But Cate is not so sure. Signs suggest that Molly might have been murdered, and Cate is not going to be rushed into a decision.

The co-worker who discovered Molly’s body, Rose Li, is convinced that Molly would not have killed herself. Between them, Cate and Rose investigate the circumstances surrounding Molly’s death: the purchase of the adjacent Canadian Forces Base by a wealthy development company, the presence of protesters opposing the sale, Molly’s recent ordering of boxes of old records from archival storage, and her appointment with a local Indigenous elder who insisted the site was sacred.

Cate is also coping with her brother Jason’s recent death, as well as residual trauma from a privileged but abusive childhood, along with her divorce from a charming but manipulative husband. Alcohol and cigarettes are her unreliable crutches as she desperately tries to stay professional and reach the correct decision.

The events in Speak for the Dead unfold ten years after those in The Foulest Things, the first in Amy Tector’s mystery series set at the fictional Dominion Archives in Ottawa. None of the earlier characters reappear in this book; the common thread is the Archives themselves, loosely modelled on Canada’s national Library and Archives, which Tector knows intimately from her years of working there as an archivist.

Amy Tector grew up in a small town in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Her lifelong love of reading and writing led her to study English literature at Acadia University (Wolfville, Nova Scotia) and Western University (London, Ontario). Leaving her PhD program partway through, she moved to Ottawa twenty years ago to work at Canada’s national archives.

In Ottawa she also signed up for an Adult-Ed writing course, where she bonded with several other writers who have, ever since, acted as a mutual critique group to encourage each others’ writing.

She and her husband, also an archivist, spent two stints as expats in Europe. The first was when her husband was the NATO archivist for three years in Brussels. While there, Amy completed her PhD and also wrote a murder mystery, which in 2008 was a finalist in the Canadian Crime Writer’s “Unhanged Arthur” Award for unpublished novels.  On returning to Canada, she had a baby and returned to work at the national archives. The expat life still called to her, however, so five years later she took a one-year contract as archivist in The Hague for the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal for War Crimes in the former Yugoslavia, and her family moved overseas again.

After twenty years of trying, she finally became a published writer in 2021 when her debut novel The HoneyBee Emeralds appeared. When her publisher asked if she had completed any other manuscripts, she dusted off the one that had been shortlisted for the 2008 “Unhanged Arthur” award: it came out in 2022 as The Foulest Things, the first in her Dominion Archives trilogy. (That novel was also, for the second time, a finalist for a Canadian Crime Writers award, this one for “Best Crime Novel Set in Canada.”) Speak for the Dead, published in 2023, is the second in the series. The third, to be published in 2024, will be called Honor the Dead.

Amy works at Library and Archives Canada, and lives in Ottawa with her husband, her daughter, and their dog.

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