Gold Digger: A Klondike Mystery Paperback – April 15, 2009

Fiona Macgillivray has buried her past. From a childhood in the Scottish Highlands to the stews of London and life as a mistress of wealthy men, Fee keeps moving to keep herself and her son Angus from harm. After travelling thousands of miles, they end up crossing the treacherous Chilicoot Pass and arrive in Dawson City, Yukon in the midst of the Gold Rush.Fiona founds the Savoy Dance Hall where lonely miners spend their nuggets and gold dust on liquor, gambling and the chance to dance with a woman. The beautiful Fiona has found that the surest way to riches is to give them respite from the filth, desperation and danger of the miners' lives.Her carefully crafted world is threatened when a nasty journalist starts writing stories filled with scurrilous lies. Then his body is found on The Savoy's stage and Fiona must fight for her livelihood and her life since most of the town despised the dead man. She also wants,to keep her secret past from the dashing Mountie. Richard Sterling, her son's hero.The atmosphere of the frontier town is vividly drawn and the cast of characters from grungy Sourdoughs to green Chechackos, who have yet to winter over in the Yukon, are captured convincingly. As one who spent seven years in ruralAlaska and who has visited the Yukon Territory, Vicki Delaney has reflected the power of nature and the strength of those pioneers who sought wealth and adventure in the land of the Midnight Sun.

I'm bowled over by the setting for this plot. Dawson sounds like living there, so near the frozen North, is never really warm, dry, or cheap. The author really made the setting come alive for me. I could see the poor horses struggling in the hip deep mud & filth, the dirty, tired, people living miserable lives for an once of gold. The plot was for me very engrossing just trying to figure out the morals of this big, little, town. I found my self wondering if the heroine, Fiona MacGillivray, hadn't lead an exemplary life then why was she against the Madame that ran the prostitutes in the alley? I could see the reason for her discouraging the women who worked for her as dance hall girls also selling their favors for money. I had no idea in Canada that the law, the North West Mounted Police made sure that the gambling halls, saloons, & brothels shut down precisely at Midnight Saturday night. As well as monitoring the morals of the people who lived there. I liked the fact that Fiona's life is given in dibs & dabs throughout the story. I admit I'm naive I had no idea, but I should have, that reporters of the day didn't write accurate copy. To sell papers they added spice to a dull story who cared if it was true? Or ruined someones reputation?The characters seemed well written & fleshed out. Irene the favorite dance hall girl out for all the money she could make, Fiona's partner Ray Walker, deeply in love with Irene, but she can't see him. Angus her son big at 12 years of age but still just a boy, the American Reporter who sweets talks Fiona yet didn't want her to know he favored prostitutes, NWMP Richard Sterling who is a good Mountie but also level headed while doing his job. And the humor of the stress & tiredness of Fiona who works many hours during the week & finds it hard to remember the new bartenders name so she finally calls him not Murray. Murray being another bartender.This look inside the Canadian gold rush is really good! I'm sure like me you will find the dirt, mud, lack of sanitation as well as the in- competent medical help appalling but yet hard to put the book down. I read enough mysteries I usually know who did it but I hadn't a clue even though the hints were could enough that when the murderer is reveled I felt I should have known she/him was the person who did it.

Vicki Delany's book, "Gold Digger," is a story of the final days of Canada's Klondike Gold Rush. The Savoy Dance Hall in Dawson, Yukon Territory is the epicenter of this fast moving western mystery. It is there we meet the polyglot population of Canadians, Americans, English, Irish, and Scots who've come to make a fortune in the gold fields. Not unlike contemporary lotteries, the line of a fortune in gold attracts the best and the worst of humanity, seemingly mediated by the desperately poor trying to scratch a living from the excitement of legendary fortunes to be had just beneath the surface of the earth or on the velvet padded gambling tables of main street saloons.Vicki Delany has assembled an all star cast of dance hall girls, drunks, thieves, prostitutes, all monitored by the Northwest Mounted Police, the "Mounties." Primary characters in this story are Fiona MacGillivray, a single parent mom and Ray Walker, her co-owner of the Savoy Dance Hall. "Gold Diggers" opens with the discovery of the corpse of Jack Ireland, a San Francisco journalist with a long and shady past, who's been murdered on the stage of the Savoy.The story moves quickly, spiced up by author Delany's wit and well-developed characters who swiftly draw the readers' sympathies for a single parent mom, a bright, likable teenager, and a noble Mounty, handsome enough to flutter the heart of the most hardened dance hall girl. In addition to the plot that includes the combination of poverty and greed that has attacted people to the Yukon, each of the characters has a story that alternately causes the reader to invest in the good guys or despise the bad ones. Those conflicts, man vs. man, lie at the sources of the tensions in "Gold Digger".Yet another feature of this novel is author Delany's talent for witty and salty metaphor, e.g. [the words of the saloon owner about the Mounty] "and he worshipped the liquor-spotted, spat-upon, sawdust-coated, cheap wooden planks that I walked on."For these reasons, the elegant well-crafted plot, and the tensions between well-developed characters of conflicting motives, "Gold Diggers" is a fast, sure read, one you won't put down and that you will finish with that satisfying read charactistic of an entertaining, sometimes profound portrait of an earlier age.