Yellowhead Blues

Finished February 7

Yellowhead Blues by R.E. Donald

This is the fifth book in the Hunter Rayne Highway Mystery series, and is set along the B.C. portion of the Yellowhead highway. Hunter is a retired RCMP officer that now works as a long-haul truck driver. He is on his way to Edmonton with a load when a man who has stopped coming the other way flags him down and asks for help catching a loose horse. The man, Leon, is a horse trainer and breeder coming from a cattle penning competition at Teepee Creek. He stopped when he saw a loose horse and then stopped Hunter before trying to catch it. The horse was scared and had blood on it. 

They managed to catch it and used Leon's dog Blue to track the trail back to where the horse came from, finding a badly injured man sitting with his back against the tree. He was near death and the two men, with no cell reception, decided to carry him on one of the horses back to the highway. 

Bianca Morrison, a RCMP Constable, was the first officer on the scene, shortly after the ambulance arrived. Bianca is from Quebec, and has felt isolated as a female officer. She hopes that she will get a chance to participate in this case. 

A couple days later Hunter gets a call from Leon, who has been arrested for the murder of the man they found. Hunter is pretty sure Leon is innocent, but he'd had an interaction with the man before, so there is history. As Hunter digs deeper into the circumstances surrounding the crime, he asks Bianca for help and gets his dispatcher El to find some of the people he wants to talk to as well. 

I found this mystery quite interesting, with lots of possible suspects. I liked seeing Hunter's personal circumstances, as well as learning of Bianca's experiences with the RCMP. Leon's dog Blue was an active player, and an engaging dog as well.