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A Saskatchewan native, Lisac moved to Edmonton in 1978 to work as a reporter at the prairie bureau of The Canadian Press. From there he moved to the Edmonton Journal, where he served as a long-running provincial affairs columnist. In 2005, he bought the independent, subscription-based newsletter Insight into Government, which he ran until retiring from the reporting life altogether in 2013.

“I found myself with time on my hands,” Lisac says. Which is when he started thinking about trying his hand at fiction.

The first thing he noticed? The freedom.

“After 40 years of being worried about the accuracy of every sentence I wrote, it was liberating to be able to write something and say, ‘This happened because I said it happened.’ It was a great escape from stress that way.”

But, to hear him tell it, even the switches he’d made in the newspaper world — from reporter to columnist and back again — required similarly broad shifts in thinking.

“Moving to the column required, really, a wholesale change of outlook. I found it took me about a year to get thoroughly acclimated. It was just so ingrained that you didn’t let opinion overshadow what you were reporting on.

“When I did eventually go to the newsletter, I found one of the things I liked about it was a reversion to a more straight reporting role. I thought of it like writing short briefings for those interested in what was going on.”

Where the Bodies Lieopens with a trial: An aging cabinet minister has brazenly run over and killed a member of his local constituency executive. “He had the brains of a gopher,” the man tells the court. “That’s what you do with gophers — run ’em over with your truck.” But when the premier suspects there’s more going on here than meets the eye, he hires a lawyer and former hockey player named Harry Asher to dig around for the truth — a seemingly simple task that opens up in front of Harry like a sinkhole.