More than Sorrow

More Than Sorrow
Vicki Delany
Poisoned Pen Press
Scottsdale, Arizona
September 2012
Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-59058-985-4
$ 24.95
312 pages

“It can be difficult for people to understand that you are ill, very ill, when they can't see any visible wounds. Easy for them to suspect you're not as sick as you make out.”

Hannah Manning has this problem. As a journalist on assignment in Afghanistan, she is injured. She comes home with a traumatic brain injury to the occipital lobe. Daily fighting headaches, voices, hallucinations, and trauma can exhaust anyone not to mention, complicating your life and concentration. Living on a family farm In Prince Edward County, Ontario, where everyone is needed for the business to succeed, she quickly finds herself a burden to her sister's family.

More than Sorrow effectively interweaves two tales into Hannah's recovery, one is about Hila Popalzai who is staying with the neighbors and is also recovering from an explosion killing her family in Afghanistan and the story of the American Revolution told from the perspective of a Tory family. For both Hila and Hannah, they develop a friendship to help healing, Hila for her visible scars andHannah for her invisible ones. While all this is going on, Hannah has to daily interact with the family and has difficulty especially with her sister's husband, Jake, who is resentful that Hannah lives there as a guest with no responsibilities.

Added to that, Hannah is blacking out for periods of time with no memory of either the amount of time or the happenings around her. When Hila is missing, then found murdered, guess who was blacked out at this time?

More than Sorrow is a superb mystery that mixes the real historical events from Afghanistan and the American Revolutionary War into a tale about brain injuries, possible ghosts, terrorism, and crime. The characters are believable, even though predictable at times. The flow of the sentences makes for quick reading in a well-organized story. The problems of having a hidden medical condition such as a brain injury is outstanding allowing the reader to view the problem and the character from various perspectives while also allowing the reader to better understand those with invisible illnesses.

Vicki Delany, the author, lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario where she continues to write her Constable Molly Smith series which is being considered for Canadian television. She recently retired from being a systems analyst.

More than Sorrow is a wonderful mystery intermixing the past with the present in real-life situations and problems in a well-written murder mystery.