Category Archives: Mary Jane Maffini

I’ve (virtually) climbed Mount Logan

Posted on by
6

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: The Devil’s in the Details by Mary Jane Maffini

Posted on by
8

This is my third book for the Canadian Book Challenge #4 and puts me at Ishpatina Ridge on the list of 13 mountains to climb (thankfully I’m only climbing virtually).

One Labour Day weekend Camilla McPhee, lawyer and victim’s rights activist in Ottawa, receives bizarre news. A woman she barely knew, Laura Brown, has died and named Camilla as her next of kin and sole heir. Camilla sets about trying to find a real family or next of kin but soon realises Laura didn’t have a single family member, friend or colleague. Added to that is Camilla’s growing worry that Laura did not die in an accident as the police presume. Investigating becomes more difficult for Camilla when police start to believe she is responsible for Laura’s death.

I generally do more research into the books I’m going to read than I did in this case but I am in need of Canadian books and this one was available at the library so I figured I’d give it a go. Happily it proved to be just what I was looking for today: a well-written, funny romp of a tale.

As the central character of the book Camilla is quite delightful: interesting enough to want to read more about but not so over-the-top quirky that you want to scream. I’ve read a load of books in this genre which do not get that balance right so I appreciate it all the more when it is done well. Her personal circumstances are largely believable and her vaguely self-deprecating, slightly cynical narration of events spiraling out of control achieved just the right note. As is the way of things in cosy mysteries Camilla had a posse of fun friends and relations, my favourite of whom was an octogenarian ballooning enthusiast neighbour who kept up a nice line in stiff upper lip support. I want to be exactly like that when I’m 80-odd. I also found I could empathise with Camilla taking perverse pleasure in doing exactly the opposite of what her perfect, control-freak siblings told her to do.

Naturally enough the story is a little far-fetched but it doesn’t stretch credibility too far and it maintains its own internal logic very well. The way in which Camilla collects information about her acquaintance is believable and the second part of the book, in which Camilla is on the run from authorities, has more credibility than a lot of thrillers I’ve read. There are a satisfying number of red herrings and false leads which makes the book a very decent whodunnit for those who like to puzzle-solve as they read.

I had a smile on my face for most of the time while reading The Devil’s in the Details and laughed out loud more than once. This is not as common an occurrence as I’d like it to be so the book gets extra points for incorporating pithy humour instead of ‘cheesyness’. I’m not sure there’s anything about it that’s particularly Canadian (multiple references to Tim Hortons aside) but being light, fast and funny puts it in the above average category for me.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3.5/5

Publisher RendezVous Crime [2004]; ISBN 189491712X ; Length 313 pages

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦