Category Archives: Inger Ash Wolfe

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.

Books of the Month – October 2010

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That Was Then

I finished another 15 books during October (a couple of reviews still to come). Although I didn’t have any 5-star reads it was a high quality month with nothing rating below a 3. My pick of the month has to be Jo Nesbø’s The Redbreast, a novel I abandoned on my first reading last year but picked up again after you all told me to and fell in love with the book’s protagonist, Harry Hole.

There are a veritable treasure trove of honourable mentions which I simply cannot separate. They include trips to Scotland, Iceland, Ghana, America, England, 1850′s Australia and Japan.

New Additions

Since buying my eReader I have curtailed my acquisition of printed books quite dramatically (good for the trees) but have been busy stocking up eBooks and audio downloads (bad for the bank balance). Included among my new acquisitions are the latest Belinda Lawrence mystery, a Harry Bosch novel (Maxine made me give Connelly another go), a flash fiction anthology of stories that involve a mythical ‘Mega Mart’, the second novel in Karin Fossum’s Inspector Sejer series (yes I know I’m behind) and a historical work that blends fact with fiction in what promises to be an interesting fashion.

Challenge Progress

It’s a good thing I had a whole year to complete the Global Reading Challenge as it looks like it will take me that long to finish it. This month I read another two books to bring my total to 19 of 21. Both Villain and Wife of the Gods made it to my honourable mentions for the month.

My only other open challenge is the Canadian Book Challenge which requires me to read 13 books by July next year. I read four books that counted for this challenge in October bringing my total to 7.

Isn’t it marvellous that Canada produces enough entertaining female crime writers that I can have a smorgasboard of them without even trying? Well I am assuming Wolfe is female though of course as it’s a pseudonym I could be wrong.

Reading Now and Next

I’m keen to finish the global challenge now that I only have 2 books to go so have started Southwesterly Wind which is set in Brazil and I’ll probably read my wildcard historical fiction straight after that. Then it might be time for my second Elly Griffiths novel I think. I’ve just started a new audio book, C J Box’s Three Weeks to Say Goodbye, which I am already enjoying and have no plans for what will come after that in audio format.

Chart of the month

So far this year I have finished 129 books which seemed like a statistically significant enough number to look at where they all come from. As you can see I buy most of my books in one form or another. Wonder what this will look like next year? Will I have a giant chunk of pie for pirated eBooks ( and if I do how will I hide it to avoid going to prison)?

What about you? What was your favourite book for October? Or your most exciting acquisition? Or is there something coming up for you in November that you can’t wait to get to?

Review: The Taken by Inger Ash Wolfe

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This is the fifth book for my Canadian Book Challenge and is the second novel from an author whose use of a pseudonym has caused more discussion than the books in some quarters. I’m happy to read the books, whoever might have penned them.

Hazel Micallef is almost 62 years old, has just undergone the second major surgery on her back in a year and is living in the basement of her ex-husband’s house where his new wife, who is unfailingly nice, feeds and bathes her. Her return to  work as the interim head of the Port Dundas Ontario police force is hastened along when fishing tourists report hooking a body in a local lake. Though the find turns out to only be a mannequin, the discovery leads Micallef and Detective Constable James Wingate into a bizarre race to save a man’s life which involves solving the riddles posed by the publication of a story in the local paper and watching horrid events unfold on an untraceable website.

I really do enjoy the depiction of Micallef in this series, probably more so in this second book. On the few occasions that ‘women of a certain age’ are depicted in crime fiction they’re usually fluffy lovely old dears or barking mad and Micallef is neither of these. She is an ordinary woman staring down the barrel of forced retirement without the man she still loves and frankly she’s cranky. At work she has flashes of genius interspersed with raging stupidity and she’s fairly hopeless at managing her relationships with others, though she seems more aware of her failings in this regard in this novel. Quite often she isn’t likable but she is an interesting character to read about. The other characters to look out for here are James Wingate, who I’d like to see more thoroughly developed though we did learn more about why he chose to move from Toronto to the more rural setting in this outing, and one

I’m afraid the plot is not quite as engaging as the characters. Though perfectly readable it was extraordinarily and unnecessarily convoluted. At their heart the motivations for what crimes took place were credible and worth exploring in some depth but for me they got a little lost amongst a series of contrivances and implausible scenarios (mostly involving Hazel going alone into places that anyone who’s ever been to a pantomime would have known called for a shouted “look out, he’s behind you”). I can’t say more without giving away spoilers but I thought the story itself would have been better off without one of the two culprits (who are revealed about half-way through the book). I also thought the book relied a little too heavily on readers’ familiarity with events in the first book which I think would have caused some confusion for readers new to the series.

Overall though I enjoyed the book. Its setting in a fictional town perhaps allows the author to take more jibes at bureaucracy and local politics than might be the case if the setting were real and these add interest to the story’s backdrop. The characters are well-developed and maintain interest despite, or perhaps because of, their prickly nature and the plot problems are manageable. Importantly this book is far less bloody than its predecessor, though there are still a couple of gruesome scenes not for the faint-hearted.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The Taken has also been reviewed at Kittling Books and you might also like to check out my review of the first book in this series, The Calling.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3.5/5
Publisher Corgi [2009]
ISBN 9781409080305
Length 303 pages
Format eBook (ePub)
Source I bought it

Review: The Calling by Inger Ash Wolfe

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Title: The Calling

Author: Inger Ash Wolfe

Publisher: Corgi [2008]

ISBN: 978-0-552-15685-1

Legnth: 512 pages

I bought the Calling a few months ago ago after reading an article about new Canadian crime fiction I should be looking out for. I rescued it from the ever-ready-to-topple Mount TBR at this particular moment due to Cathy’s passionate review last week. What annoys me is that it took me so long to read this wonderful book.

In the small fictional town of Port Dundas in rural Canada a loved elderly inhabitant invites a man into her home and he kills her. When her tortured body is discovered the Police are baffled as to who would commit such an act in a place where everyone knows everyone else.  When a second body, similarly mutilated, is discovered in an adjacent town the local Police think they may have stumbled onto a serial killer.

It’s the characters in this book that captured my heart. Hazel Micallef is the main protagonist and she’s not your run-of-the-mill investigator. She’s 61 and feels older than her 87 year old mother, is newly divorced, needs major back surgery and survives on pain-killers and whisky, is techno-phobic and deals with moronic bureaucrats for a living. Over the course of the book she does some silly things that if she were thinking more clearly she probably wouldn’t do, but haven’t we all cut off our own noses to spite our faces at one time or another? Her actions are very believable even though everyone knows, Hazel included, that there are smarter ways to deal with pen-pushers than taunting them.

The minor characters are well-fleshed out too. James Wingate, a new transfer from Toronto is quite a lovable if tetchy police officer and Hazel’s mother Emily and the French detective Sevigny are both a delight. We also spend a good deal of time with the perpetrator of the crimes and even some time with the victims and this adds an extra dimension The Calling. Normally in these kinds of books I find myself thinking about the victims ‘that’s all very well but no real people would actually fall for that ruse’ whereas here I could easily identify with the particular kind of promise offered by this killer and therefore had no trouble imagining him collecting his victims. Wolfe has depicted the small town life beautifully too and the location is almost another character in its own right. In that respect I found this book similar to another excellent Canadian tale I read earlier this year: Valley of the Lost by Vicki Delany.

The story certainly maintains interest with very little bloat in its 500+ pages and has several nicely unpredictable twists. There are bits of the plot that I found difficult to swallow though including some techno-babble of the kind that populates crime on TV (where a computer application manages to do things that stretch the bounds of credibility way beyond breaking point and all in the time it takes real-world computers to turn on). Then there’s the fact that even when it’s understood there is serial killer on the loose, the case is still left in the hands of what is essentially a small outpost of a handful of officers. No matter how much the townsfolk and junior officers love Hazel I didn’t believe this for a nanosecond.

However, I fairly easily put that aside and still found the book an above average read with terrific characters and good story telling with a decidedly grizzly streak to keep the more blood thirsty readers happy.

My rating 4/5

Other stuff

Reviewed by Cathy at Kittling Books (thanks for prompting me to rescue it from the TBR pile) and Karen at Aust Crime Fiction.

Inger Ash Wolfe is a pseudonym for an apparently well known North American author. There has been much speculation on that continent about who has written anonymously as seen in this article in The Star. Sarah Weinman raised some interesting points and received this response from Inger Ash Wolfe which is quite fascinating. For the record I’ve no clue who it might be and am more curious about why they chose this route than who it is.

There is apparently going to be a second book in this series released soon. I shall look forward to reading it.