After the publication of On Double Tracks, Pinder focused on her legal work, primarily on First Nations land claims in British Columbia; a few years ago, she turned to writing full-time.
Pinder's first novel Under The House (1986) was re-created for the Vancouver stage for the Women in View Festival in 1990, a one-woman performance by Trish Grainge, directed by Jane Heyman.
The story unfolds primarily through the eyes of a niece, related by marriage rather than blood, and her aunt, both ostracized by the family patriarch, a misguided and controlling man intent on eliminating any 'outsiders' from sharing in the grandfather's estate.
Pinder deals with the topic of incest delicately, and without setting up a stereotypical good-and-evil dichotomy, one of the many reasons the novel earned the respect of reviewers and colleagues, among them, the critic for The New York Times, who described Under the House as ".
The inspiration for Pinder's second novel On Double Tracks (1988, short-listed for the 1990 Canadian Governor General's Award for English Fiction) came, in part, from the treatment she received by the judge hearing one of her native land claims cases.
[4] In the novel, a young woman lawyer goes to court to reclaim land for a native Band, but from the outset of the trial, things go badly, and a disturbing level of confrontation builds.
Pinder's writing style has been compared to Faulkner in its depiction of the fictional unconscious,[5] her prose both stark and subtle,[6] intense and compassionate.