Category Archives: Gail Bowen

I’ve (virtually) climbed Mount Logan

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I’m prepared to accept that reading 13 books is not quite as rigorous a challenge as climbing the highest mountain in Canada, and I’m sure it was a lot more fun but the stages of the Canadian Book Challenge #4 were all names after mountains so I’m happy to claim the scalp. For the challenge I needed to read 13 Canadian books (written by Canadians or set in Canada) between 1 July 2010 and 1 July 2011 so I’ve squeaked in with a month to spare. And here they are one more time:

Book 1 - April Fool by William Deverell (rated 3.5) A funny tale featuring an over 50 lawyer battling the forces of environmental destruction.

Book 2 - The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney (rated 3.5) An evocative historical fiction tale featuring the hunt for a murderer in remote Canada in 1867. This one ties for the best sense of place of the bunch.

Book 3 – The Devil’s in the Details by Mary Jane Maffini (rated 3.5) A victim’s right’s activist is named the beneficiary of the will of someone she can’t remember meeting which turns out to put her life in danger.

Book 4 –  Dead Politician Society by Robin Spano (rated 3) A Toronto politician is killed and a young female policewoman goes under cover in a local political science course to see if the murderer can be found.

Book 5 – The Taken by Inger Ashe Wolfe (rated 3.5) The discovery that a body in a lake is really a mannequin should bring relief to 62 year-old policewoman Hazel Micallef but it starts a strange game of cat & mouse with a killer.

Book 6 – The Dead of Midnight by Catherine Hunter (rated 3.5) A crime fiction book club losing members due to their grizzly deaths. Eeek, a little close to home :)

Book 7 - Negative Image by Vicky Delany (rated 3.5) A fashion photographer is murdered in the fictional town of Trafalgar (BC) and local policeman John Winters is under suspicion for the crime.

Book 8 – A Colder Kind of Death by Gail Bowen (rated 3.5) Joanne Kilbourn becomes a murder suspect when the man who is in prison for murdering her husband is killed.

Book 9 – Forty Words for Sorrow by Giles Blunt (rated 3.5) A young girl’s body is found 5 months after she was assumed to have run away and Detective John Cardinal must investigate this crime and others linked to it. This was the other book that tied for best sense of place as it had very strong imagery. It would have rated 4 but for the rather lengthy focus on the torture perpetrated on some of the victims. 

Book 10 - The Edge by Dick Francis (rated 4) The only ring-in but the book features an across-Canada rail trip on which an English Jockey Club investigator goes undercover to try to stop a criminal deed. It’s Dick Francis at his storytelling best.

Book 11 – The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (rated 2.5) A dystopian future not unlike many others depicted for us I found this one a bit predictable and very, very slow. It didn’t help that the audio book contained the book’s hymns being sung by a dweeb with a guitar which was very grating on the ears.

Book 12 – The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny (rated 3.5) In a fictional Quebec village the body of a man is found in the local bistro which is odd enough but even more peculiar is that no one in the small village admits to knowing who he is.

Book 13 – An Ordinary Decent Criminal by Michael Van Rooy (rated 3.5) A funny and engaging tale in which an ex violent criminal moves to Winnipeg where some people are determined not to make it easy for him to ‘go straight’.

I can’t really draw any insightful conclusions about the state of Canadian crime fiction (all but one of these books was in my preferred genre) other than that I think it’s in fine shape if a near random selection of books can produce 11 out of 13 books rated A good, solid entertaining read with a spark of something special or better on my personal rating scale. The only theme (if you can call it that) I noticed is that more than a few of the books dealt with tough subjects through the use of humour that seemed similar in some ways to the Australian way of looking at things. Of course this could be because I naturally selected books like that when scouring descriptions and reviews for challenge books.

I will be reading more by many of these authors which is, I guess, at least one aim of the challenge and have another Canadian book nearing the top of my TBR pile which will count towards the Global Reading Challenge.

Review: A Colder Kind of Death by Gail Bowen

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The 8th book I will count towards the current Canadian Book Challenge is the fourth in its series and won the 1995 Arthur Ellis Award for best crime novel.

It has been six years since Joanne Kilbourn’s husband was bashed to death by the side of the road while driving home from a funeral but she is forced to re-visit the event during the publicity over the death in a drive-by shooting while in the prison exercise yard of the man convicted of his murder . When, a few days later, the man’s girlfriend who had been with him at the roadside murder but who was thought not to have had any involvement in the death is also killed, Joanne finds herself a suspect. Fearing the police might not look further and believing the answers to the murders lie in the events that transpired immediately before her husband’s death Joanne sets out to find out who the killer is.

At first it appeared that the plot of this novel would follow a fairly predictable path but it soon veered off into far more interesting territory involving the hopes and fears of the group of lifelong friends and colleagues that Joanne and her husband had been part of. She is forced to confront some unpleasant possibilities such as the notion her husband had been keeping secrets from her in the lead up to his death and even whether or not his death was something more sinister than a random killing. In doing this she uncovers more than one well hidden secret among the group of friends who were once all political colleagues who have a mixture of personal demons and professional troubles they are trying to hide.

In all her roles, as a college professor, mother of four, political activist and amateur sleuth Joanne manages to be both believable and sympathetic and I enjoyed meeting her. Amateur detectives normally stretch the bounds of credibility fairly early on but here both her motive for becoming involved in the investigation and her methodology made sense. She is the person with most to lose of the truth is not uncovered and she is also able to talk to her friends and her husband’s former colleagues in a way that police might not be able to. I’m not sure how this would play out in the 11 other books in the series (none of which I’ve read) but in this story anyway everything fell into place very well.

There are other well-drawn characters, including a couple on the nastier side of the psychological spectrum, and some lighter moments chiefly provided by Joanne’s cat-loving six-year old daughter Taylor, in this entertaining read. Aside from a little local politics there wasn’t a heck of a lot that made this book stand out as Canadian for me but it definitely stands out in the mystery stakes.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3.5/5
Publisher McClelland & Stuart [this edition 1995, original edition 1994]
ISBN 9780771014833
Length 217 pages
Format mass market paperback
Source I mooched it