Seldom Seen Road is the first in the Burnt River series of murder mysteries featuring the Roth family detective trio: Mark, his daughter Stephanie, and his cousin Jeremy. Of the three, Mark has the least solid claim on the art of solving murders, but he is driven by the insistent busybody nature of the recently retired. Profoundly hard-of-hearing after a career in musical performance, and equally disappointed with finding himself alone in his world after the death of his beloved wife, Mark stubbornly and clumsily puts himself in harm's way to draw out the truth. Constable Jeremy Roth is the muscle of the group, patrolling the northern highways for the local police detachment and investigating on the ground. Mark's beloved daughter, Stephanie, building her name as a criminologist at the university in Thunder Bay, gets to the details of the matter using her academic credentials and her innate puzzle-solving instincts. When the body of local environmental activist Paul Robichaud washes up on the bank of a river in the small northern town of Burnt River, blunt-force wounds to his head suggesting murder, Mark is jarred out of his retirement reverie and drawn into the mystery.