Ice Trap-Kitty Sewell

Ice Trap
Kitty Sewell
Touchstone, Feb 2008, $24.95
ISBN 9781416539971

The letter from Canada shook up Dr. Dafydd Woodruff, as the Cardiff, Wales based surgeon has never been touched before. Married to Isabel, his bones shake as he rereads the note from thirteen year old Miranda who insists he is her father and that of her twin brother Mark. Still he shows his wife the letter, but is not very sympathetic as she assumes he got drunk and shagged the head nurse; he hides the time he spent with Uyarasuq from his spouse for fear she will know the depth of his feelings for the Canadian native.

Dafydd thinks back to when he spent a year practicing medicine in Moose Creek, Northwest Territories as a means of paying penitence for messing up an operation of a Welsh lad. He remembers vividly expecting to meet no one of consequence in the remote small village. Instead there was his head nurse Sheila Hailey, as acrimonious of a person one could ever have met. Now she accuses him of siring her twins; an impossible occurrence as he never slept with her. When DNA testing affirms her assertion, Dafydd returns to Moose Creek to learn more about how he fathered two children without sleeping with the mother.

The location and the lead character’s obvious amateur sleuthing make for a fine tale as the audience and Dafydd wonder how in this isolated village with not much medical technology he sired the kids. The eccentric support cast embellishes the sense of remoteness. Filled with twists though somewhat lacking in suspense readers will appreciate learning just how the Welsh doctor fell into an ICE TRAP.

Harriet Klausner