Probably the most enjoyable of several locales to which I was assigned in the U.S. Foreign Service was Montreal, Canada.

Montreal is a vibrant city in the French speaking province of Quebec. The St. Lawrence River flows past it on its way from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

My husband and I biked several times along the river. We also hiked up Mount Royal, overlooking the city.

We ate in Montreal’s many restaurants, sampling the cuisine of numerous countries from which its migrant populations have come.

We rented a condo in one of the renovated buildings in the older section of the city, a locale reminiscent of French towns known by many of the early settlers.

The old town features prominently in my newest novel, A Second Grieving. Indeed, Mark Pacer, the main character of Grieving, is drawn into the aftermath of a murder in the lobby of an old Montreal building.

A fiction, of course. No murder occurred anywhere near us while we lived in the old city, but it made a stunning locale for the book.

Featured in Grieving is the new swell of displaced people disturbing settled democracies. Though the story takes place in the late 1980’s, the movements which would roil the world in later decades are a part of this story.

Countless immigrants have found new beginnings in both Canada and the United States. But what of native cultures overwhelmed from the beginning by these new cultures?

No easy answers exist. The story frames questions in a fictional format.

Along the way, Mark continues his spiritual pilgrimage, some of it while sitting in a chapel of the Notre-Dame Basilica in old Montreal.