Category Archives: Canadian Book Challenge #4, 2010-11

Review: An Ordinary Decent Criminal by Michael Van Rooy

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After a strong start I’ve let my completion of the Canadian Book Challenge limp along for the past few months but have finally gotten around to reading the 13th and final book which allows me to (virtually) reach the summit of Mount Logan (all the challenge’s steps have been named after Canadian mountains).

Monty Haaviko has killed, stolen, sold drugs and spent quite a bit of time in prison. But, at 32, he’s changed his name (though almost no one calls him by the new one), has recently married a woman he loves, is the proud father of 10 month-old Fred and has just moved to Winnipeg determined to go straight. However when his house is broken into by three men one night and all of them end up dead at Monty’s hands few people, especially not the Winnipeg police, believe that he was sincere in giving up his life of crime. Monty, ably assisted by his wife Claire, have to prove his innocence and come up with creative ways to stop to the campaign to run them out of town.

I can’t remember who or what prompted me to get hold of this book (other than its Canadian-ness) but I’m very glad I did as it is a refreshingly unpredictable tale.  Monty borders on being a little bit too clever at MacGyvering his way out of problem situations to be 100% credible but Van Rooy has used enough gentle humour and self-deprecation in his protagonist to make me want to believe in the character and I ended up willing him on to success at defeating his enemies with only length of rope and a drill bit. I also like the fact that his definition of ‘going straight’ is different from what mine would be (no killing but petty theft and the odd small con job seem to be OK) because that is more believable than someone managing to make a switch in one fell swoop. Perhaps the most likable characteristic about him for me though is that he never once downplays his violent, criminal past or tries to brush it off as someone else’s fault. He just wants people to accept that he’s done all the prison time he was sentenced too and is now a changed, or at least changing, man.

The plot unfolds well, almost in two parts as first Monty deals with extricating himself from the immediate legal problem of having killed intruders in his house and then moves on to sorting out the bigger problem of the campaign against him. There are lots of really terrific scenes in which Monty spots potential set-ups and manages to wriggle out of them before they do much damage (during which I learned many helpful hints for turning to a life of crime should the urge ever arise) and it’s fun to watch him turn the tables on his tormentors. My one quibble is that I never quite swallowed the motivation behind the tormenting but that’s a small thing really as I could well believe it was happening regardless of the reason.

I really had no expectations of this book by the time I plucked it from the TBR pile so was chuffed to find characters and a storyline that were unusual and engaging. It was one of those books I took every opportunity to read (e.g. gobbled up some pages while standing precariously on the bus) because I really became quite desperate to find out what would happen next. It does require a higher-than-usual suspension of disbelief but it’s worth it for the large dose of fun and the opportunity to question one’s ingrained stereotypes about good guys and bad guys. 

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Though only in his 40′s Michael Van Rooy passed away earlier this year, so this and the two subsequent Monty Haaviko books are, I assume, all that we’ll see.

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My rating 3.5/5
Author website
http://www.michaelvanrooy.com/

PublisherRaven Stone (2005)
ISBN 0888013132
Length 341 pages
Format paperback
Book Series #1 in the Monty Haaviko series
Source I mooched it

Review: The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny

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The Brutal Telling is my face-to-face bookclub’s choice this month and I’m also using it as the 12th of 13 books I need to read to complete the Canadian Book Challenge #4.

In the fictional Quebec village of Three Pines a body is found in the local bistro. This would be odd enough except that no one admits to knowing who the man is in this tight-knit community where everyone knows everyone else, and the idyllic village has produced enough murdered people to soon rival Cabot Cove or the villages of Midsomer. Penny even makes reference to this within the book with the line “Every Quebec village has a vocation…Some make cheese, some wine, some pots. We produce bodies.” Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, the Montreal Sureté’s cleverest policeman, heads off to Three Pines with his team to once again unravel the mystery behind the murder.

One of the village’s residents does know who the body belongs to (though he is loathe to admit it). He has spent time with the dead man in his cabin in the woods where a ghastly fairytale of chaos, the furies, disease, famine and despair slowly unfolds over weeks of visits. To me The Brutal Telling was a bit like that fairy tale, slowly revealing its deeply buried and dark secrets over a series of encounters that are all just a little bit unreal but are nevertheless compelling.

The ‘unreality’ stems partly from the setting, a strange little village which almost everyone who lives there seems to have stumbled across accidentally in their attempts to escape ‘the city’ and partly from the characters who are universally quirky. There’s a gruff old poet with a pet duck who wears discarded baby clothes, two of the country’s best painters married to each other and grappling with almost insurmountable doubts about their respective talents, the most recent incomers who are a family intent on transforming an old house where something evil has previously happened. Individually they are all quite engaging but collectively anyway are not quite believable as a community.

The problem with creating characters who are of such superior intellect that they really don’t need anyone to help them is that they’re kind of boring unless you give them some compensatory flaws like Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse. Accordingly Inspector Armand Gamache is just a little bit too nice and normal with his loving wife and wonderful children (and let’s not forget that oft-mentioned brilliance enabling him to solve every case he encounters) to have really grabbed my attention. I like his team much more, my favourite is probably Jean Guy Beauvoir who has a fairly bitter, sardonic view of the world:

But odd as his family might be, they were nothing compared to this. In fact, that was one of the great comforts of his job. At least his family compared well to people who actually killed each other, rather than just thought about it.

The story itself is cleverly constructed, offering lots of possible suspects and red-herrings galore, though never losing sight of the ultimate prize as might easily have been done. In the end the solution was as I had thought it would be at the beginning, but that’s not to take away from what was a quite beautifully drawn web during which I frequently thought I must have it wrong. Among the things I liked most about the writing was the way Penny allowed everything from modern policing techniques to indigenous beliefs to play their respective roles in the telling of her tale of human frailty.

The only book of this series that I have read is the second one, Dead Cold, which I liked except for the fact it really demanded you had read the first novel in the series which annoyed me immensely. I thought Penny did a much better job here of ensuring the book could be read by both fans of the series and people who hadn’t read previous books. I’m still clearly missing something about Louise Penny’s much lauded and award-winning work though as I didn’t seem to adore this as most of her readers have done. That said though I enjoyed the story a lot and have no hesitation recommending the book, especially if you like your mysteries on the lighter side and your settings to draw you in to their surreal embrace.

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The Brutal Telling has been reviewed at Mysteries in Paradise (by Kerrie, who liked it so much she chose it for our face to face bookclub’s monthly selection)

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My rating 3.5/5
Author website
http://www.louisepenny.com/

Publisher Headline [2009]
ISBN 9780755341054
Length 460 pages
Format paperback
Book Series #5 in the Armand Gamache/Three Pines series
Source I borrowed it from the library

Review: The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

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My second reading goal for 2011 (other than reducing my TBR) is to read an occasional novel outside my preferred crime fiction genre. And I couldn’t really complete a Canadian Book Challenge without including a title by the woman often called Canada’s Greatest Living Writer could I?

There was a time when I devoured dystopian fiction in all its forms but it’s been a while since I felt the lure of that particular sub-genre. Some years ago and almost overnight I seemed to lose all interest in allegorical tales and brand (sometimes brave) new worlds. So I somewhat surprised myself recently when I eagerly selected Margaret Atwood’s recent companion novel to 2003’s Oryx and Crake, though I admit a large part of my interest was due to the format. The best of Atwood’s prose has always bordered on poetry and poetry is, in turn, at its best when read aloud.

Atwood is not new to imagining for us civilizations gone wrong. Here, in the same setting and time frame in which Oryx and Crake takes place it is Year 25 after the vaguely described collapse of civilization due to genetic engineering gone awry (or not depending on your point of view). In the current year there has been a further cataclysmic event, called a waterless flood by the dominant religious cult in the society though in reality a kind of virulent plague, which only those who were isolated at the time have survived. Two of the survivors are Toby, a mature woman who had barricaded herself in the luxury spa in which she worked, and Ren a younger girl who happened to be in her strip-club’s isolation tank when the virus broke out.

The first two thirds of the novel consists of alternating flashbacks from Toby and Ren detailing their lives from the first year to the present day. The local governance is provided by a Corporation called Helth Wizer, an evil corporation intent on weird science and killing people who fail to follow the rules then using their body parts as the ingredients in Secret Burgers. People either live in Helth Wizer’s luxury compound, the dangerous areas outside known as the pleeblands or in the rooftop garden and surrounding buildings populated by God’s Gardeners. The Gardeners are led by the enigmatic Adam One and espouse a mixture of pop psychology, radical environmentalism and a disdain for science. The final third of the novel takes place in real-time as the few survivors of the waterless flood find each other and attempt to keep surviving.

Atwood vehemently argues she doesn’t write science fiction because any of the science in her books is possible today, though she seems comfortable with the speculative fiction label. Based on this book anyway that seems a fair call. The strongest element of the novel by far is the complex, intricate picture it presents of a world transformed by a mixture of natural events and humankind’s astonishing capacity for arrogance. The new world has its own rules, nomenclature (sometimes funny, sometimes eye-rollingly cute), detailed societal structure and scientific experimentation, particularly of the genetic splicing kind, gone mad. The beliefs espoused by God’s Gardeners are also described in a lot of detail partly through Toby and Ren’s memories (both women were members for a time) and also because each new section of the novel takes place on one of the religion’s many saint’s days and commences with a sermon and a hymn (more about the hymns later). I did get a chuckle out of the saints who were mostly heroes of modern environmental movements including Dianne Fossey, James Lovelock and Australia’s own Tim Flannnery.

Reading this novel was, for me, like reading a very detailed travel diary of someone else’s trip to an exotic place I’ve never been. Bits of it were mildly interesting, some of it was unfathomable and quite a bit of it was fairly dull. While many of the ‘big things’ in the novel are not clearly described or defined (for example you’re never sure where this is all taking place, I assume it’s somewhere in North America, possibly even Atwood’s native Canada, but I have read reviews which talk about it being in England) many of the small things are described in minute detail. Much of Toby and Ren’s reminiscences relate to chores they undertook, meals they ate, classes they took or taught and religious ceremonies they participated in. For a while these are mildly interesting but 13 hours turned out to be more than enough for me.

Other than this I felt like there wasn’t a lot of substance to the novel. The doom and gloom message about the world going to hell in a handbasket if we continue on in our destructive, consumptive ways is all very well (and highly likely to be totally true) but here it was told without subtlety and lightness of touch. Long before the end I was willing to shout “I get the point, please stop repeating yourself now and tell me about something actually happening”. I think if you’re already on the ‘green’ side of the fence you’re going to be nodding and mumbling “right on sister” all the way along and if you’re on the ‘let’s all drive SUVs and hunt panda bears for sport’ side of the fence you’ll think this is all crackpot nonsense and probably stop reading. To me it’s too blunt and preachy to really engage the undecideds if that is indeed part of Atwood’s mission.

Finally, the characters are not particularly compelling. Toby and Ren are not awful, they’re not wonderful, they’re just two ordinary people who go through a whole lot of stuff, a small portion of which is dramatically interesting, and who, like most of us, don’t have profound things to say much of the time. Imagine any random two women you know then wonder just how much of their lives and thoughts you’d want to be let into. There are some lovely moments with each of them when they have an insight into their respective plights, and there are a few vignettes of true warmth or stark beauty with other characters too. But they’re noticeable for their rarity.

Perhaps I’ve simply passed the time in my life when dystopian futures can truly engage me or perhaps I’ve become too used to narratives which tell a more plot-driven story than this more literary work. I think the writing itself was a bit more pedestrian than Atwood’s best and ultimately I thought it could have done with a good edit and a reason to finish it.

What about the audio book

Lorelei King had a lovely narrating style, barely changing her voice at all for the different characters or sections of the book though somehow making it easy to follow regardless of that. However I really could have done without the hymns. Atwood wrote the words of 14 hymns which start each section of the book and some dude put her words to the kind of music that reminded me why I hated going to church when I was a kid. If you follow the link you can hear what I mean (click on the listen button next to any of the songs and you can hear it without needing to pay and download).

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Other participants in the Canadian Book Challenge have reviewed the book and loved it a whole lot more than I did so do check out reviews at An Adventure in Reading, Bad Tempered Zombie, Jules’ Book Reviews, Reading Through Life. Though I was a little heartened to see that I am not completely alone in my feelings, the Challenge’s host John from The Book Mine Set felt a little bit similar to me, this is not Atwood at her best. Meh would sum it up nicely for me too John

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My rating 2.5/5
Author website
http://www.margaretatwood.ca/

Narrator Lorelei King
Publisher BBC WW [2009]
ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 12 hours 52 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series Sequel/companion to Oryx and Crake
Source I bought it

Review: The Edge by Dick Francis

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I know Francis wasn’t Canadian but I am including this book as the 10th in my Canadian Book Challenge because it is not only set there but celebrates the natural beauty of the country via its depiction of a great train journey from the east to west coast.

In a recent court case against English racing identity Julius Filmer for conspiracy to murder all the prosecution witnesses mysteriously disappeared or ‘forgot’ their evidence and he was acquitted. When he gets himself on board the The Great Transcontinental Mystery Race Train which will take a week to cross Canada from Toronto to Vancouver full of international race horse owners and their horses people in authority are worried about what he plans. They ask Tor Kelsey, who works for the British Jockey Club’s security services to go on the train undercover to prevent Filmer from doing anything to disrupt the train or the events planned in towns across the country.

This is a re-read for me as I bought a bunch of Dick Francis audio books on sale recently and happily it is as good as I remember.  What I like most about it is the really thoughtful characterisations. Tor Kelsey, who is independently wealthy but works anyway ‘to avoid the temptation of being able to have every sweet in the sweet shop’ is a typical Francis protagonist: intelligent, self-reliant, morally sound without being self-righteous and also has a sense of humour. It’s easy to dismiss this kind of character as unrealistic but apart from liking to think there are good people in the world I was struck by the credibility of Tor’s thoughts and actions all the way along. At one point in the story for example things are set up for two trains to crash and when Tor, given the task of stopping one of the trains before it rams the other, believes he has failed his emotional response is very real indeed. He not only worries about the possible injuries and damage but can also see into his own future and predict how terrible it will be to have to live with his failure every day. That combination of self-interest and concern for others felt very realistic to me.

Among the passengers on the train is the Lorimer family who are very wealthy and well-known but are happy to ‘do their bit for the good of Canadian racing’. Mercer, his wife Bambi and their two teenage children appear to have it all but as the story progresses the pain that the family is experiencing is teased out in a very touching way. The character of Filmer in some ways is very under-developed because we actually don’t see much of him until the end but it seems to me that he is explored via his impact on those around him as he sets out to exploit people’s fears over the possibility of having their personal secrets revealed.

As always with a Dick Francis novel there is lots of great detail about his chosen subjects, this time train trivia features prominently as do wonderful descriptions of Canada that made me want to get my passport out immediately. The plot is, of course, resolved very satisfactorily though there is some sadness too and overall I think this is one of Francis’ best yarns.

What about the audio book?

Tony Britton, who has narrated a bunch of Francis’ novels, again does a great job, especially has he’s had to include a load of accents (Canadians might disagree that these are realistic but I don’t know the accent well enough to spot this and thought he did a fine job). I gather this recording has been transferred from an older format to a digital one and there is a bit of background noise (tape hiss?) that is audible at some points but not nearly enough to bother me.

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My rating 4/5
Narrator Tony Britton
Publisher BBC WW [this edition 2005, original edition 1988]
ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 11 hours 23 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Source I bought it

Review: Forty Words for Sorrow by Giles Blunt

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I read Giles Blunt’s first crime novel as the 9th book in my 13-book Canadian Book Challenge.

Detective John Cardinal of the Algonquin Bay Police Department worked the Katie Pine case as though she had been kidnapped and probably murdered even though everyone else thought she was a runaway. When her body is discovered in an abandoned mineshaft five months after her disappearance it falls to Cardinal to notify the thirteen year-old’s mother of her only child’s death.

The Inuit, it is said, have forty words for snow, Cardinal mused, what people really need is forty words for sorrow. Grief. Heartbreak. Desolation. These were not enough, not for this childless mother in her empty house.

This scene, which occurs near the beginning of the novel, is heart-wrenching and sets the tone for a sombre, sorrow-filled tale about missing teenagers, the police who must look for them and the people who took them.

A young boy had gone missing shortly after Katie Pine and Cardinal is convinced the two cases are related. After Katie’s body is found he and his new partner, Lise Delorme who has recently transferred to Homicide from Special Investigations, are allowed to spend time on the cases and they learn that Katie was alive and tortured for some time before she died. When they learn of a new victim, possibly still alive, the race is on to find the culprit. At the same time as all this is going on Delorme is tasked by her superiors with secretly investigating Cardinal who they suspected of having provided a known criminal with tip-offs and other valuable information.

The highlight of the novel is the characterisations, particularly of Cardinal. We learn a lot about his private life, including the fact that his wife is very ill which has led him, in the past, to make some bad choices in life. His sorrow relates to both his past actions and his current helplessness over his wife’s illness.  At about the half-way point of the novel readers learn who has committed the crimes and from that point on we start to see action unfold from their point of view to contrast with the police investigation. It is not giving too much of a spoiler to say that there are two people involved with the killings and while we spend a deal of time with both I will remember one of the portraits in particular of the person so starved for affection that they will learn to kill for it.

Another standout element of Forty Words for Sorrow is the depiction of the small town and its surrounds. From the outset my head was full of images created using Blunt’s words, starting with the frozen body in its block of ice (not to mention the mechanics of extracting it). The depiction of the harsh, freezing far Northern winter with its frozen lakes you can literally drive a truck on (hard to imagine for someone who dwells on the edge of a desert), short days and houses impossible to heat is first rate.

In some ways I thought the mystery was the weakest element of the novel as there was a little too much unnecessary focus on the torture perpetrated by the killers for my liking. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was gratuitous but it hovered around that mark and some careful editing using the theory that readers will probably imagine what you don’t describe in detail would, I think, have made for a better story. Overall though the book has much to recommend it and this is one Canadian author whose other works I will be chasing up after my current reading challenge is complete. It’s probably not news to many that the reportedly large number of words that the Inuit have for snow is an urban myth but I still think it’s a great title for this book which is, ultimately, about all the different kinds of sorrow there are.

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My rating 3.5/5
Publisher Harper Collins [2002]
ISBN 0007115776
Length 425 pages
Format mass market paperback
Source I mooched it

Books of the Month – November 2010

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That Was Then

November was another good reading month for me as I finished 14 books. My favourite was the second installment of the Ruth Galloway series by Elly Griffiths: The Janus Stone. Happily the third book by Griffiths is due in January and I have pre-ordered my copy.

Honourable mentions for the month go to My Soul to Take by Yrsa Sigurdardottir whose heroine, Thóra Gudmundsdóttir, shares some very enjoyable similarities with Ruth Galloway and to one of my favourite books from this year’s Global Reading Challenge, Luis Alfredo Garcia-Roza’s Southwesterly Wind.

New Additions

My acquisition of printed books has slowed a little but I have only replaced it with eBook purchasing. One day I’ll learn self control. Or not. Anyway, among this month’s new friends are two books set in Sweden, one in Los Angeles, one in Canada and one that seems to take place all over the globe.

Challenge Progress

I finished the extreme level of the 2010 Global Challenge in November and enjoyed it so much I have already signed up for the 2011 version of the challenge which I hope to complete from my existing TBR collection.

I only read one book for the Canadian Book Challenge this month, Gail Bowen’s A Colder Kind of Death, bringing my total for the challenge to 8. I still have 7 months to read 3 more books (all of which are on my TBR shelves) so I am confident of success.

My newest challenge is the Good Reads Aussie Readers Summer Reading Challenge which should see me read at least 9 books from my TBR over what will undoubtedly be a long, hot summer.

Reading Now and Next

On the go at the moment I have Lindy Cameron’s Redback which has sat on my TBR for too long (it’s an Aussie thriller with a good dose of humour which is due for re-release shortly I believe) and am dipping in and out of Discount Noir, the flash fiction anthology about terrible things happening in giant supermarkets (thank heavens for online shopping is all I can say). Keeping my company while I walk at the moment is Our Lady of Pain by Elena Forbes.

Towards the end of the year I always seem to need to wind down with some lighter fare so I think some more thrillers and a cosy whodunnit or two are on the cards. I recently bought a couple of old Dick Francis novels for $5 a pop in Audible’s audio book sale so I’ll have some entertaining (if predictable) listening in the next few weeks.

 

Chart of the Month

As I may have mentioned I feel my TBR is a little out of control at the moment, standing at 197 books if I count orders that will trickle in over coming months. As that’s about 18 months worth of reading it feels like the right time (or possibly ever so slightly past the right time) to try to address the issue by doing things like signing up for challenges I can complete from my existing stockpile. I know myself well enough to realise I won’t completely reign in my acquisitiveness but I am hopeful that my new strategy will help me to slow down a little at least. Currently my TBR pie looks like this

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.

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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

Review: Negative Image by Vicki Delany

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The 7th book which will count towards my Canadian Book Challenge is the newest installment of Vicki Delany’s Constable Molly Smith series and is due for publication on 2 Nov 2010. This pushes me over the half-way point of the challenge.

In the fictional small town of Trafralgar in British Columbia a famous fashion photographer is murdered in his hotel room. At first the town’s small police force requests the help of the Mounted Police for simple manpower reasons but when the wife of their lead investigator, John Winters, falls under suspicion they are forced to rely, seemingly mistakenly, on the impartiality of the outsiders.

I was very angry with John Winters for much of this book. His behaviour upon learning his wife Eliza was under suspicion for the murder was pretty poor, essentially he abandons the woman he has apparently loved for 25 years, and I mentally tut-tutted that I expected better of a man like him. This is not to say his behaviour was unrealistic, I suspect it would be a common response, but says a lot for the way Delany has grown her stock characters over the series that I was disappointed in Winters. I would also have liked to have seen things more from Eliza’s point of view. We do learn a little about her days as a young fashion model when she had a relationship with the murder victim but it would have been nice to see more of her reacting to being under suspicion and having a her husband go AWOL rather than deal with the issue.

Molly Smith is growing into a nicely well-rounded character. Here Delany depicts the difficulty a young woman might face being in the police force. Not only is Molly subject to some pretty juvenile ribbing and even nastier innuendo about her sexual exploits (let’s face it this could happen to any woman in any job) but she also comes under threat from a man she was responsible for jailing who has now been released. Although I’m sure male police officers experience threats and worse from criminals they’ve imprisoned, I suspect for a certain type of man it would be far worse to have been caught by a ‘lowly’ woman and that’s what seems to play out here. Given that Molly is also undergoing some family trauma and experiencing some minor troubles with her fledgling relationship she’s got a lot to handle in this book but works through it all credibly.

The plot itself, including the main mystery as well as a side thread about a series of robberies and a storyline dealing with Molly’s father’s illness, is very sound if not terribly surprising. As always with this series it is the mixture of crime solving and small town life that is appealing as both feed off each other. Although this book doesn’t have quite the social conscience that attracted me to Valley of the Lost, the second book in the series, it is an above average small town police procedural with very engaging characters and a satisfying puzzle to solve. Another point in its favour is that you could easily read it without having read the previous books in the series which is something of a rarity these days and is to be applauded as there are only so many backlists a mystery fan can contemplate.

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I have read and reviewed two of the three previous books in this series: Valley of the Lost and Winter of Secrets

Negative Image has also been reviewed at Make Mine Mystery and Tome’s Devotee

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My rating 3.5/5
Publisher Poisoned Pen Press [2010]
ISBN 9781590587881 (for the hard cover)
Length 274 pages
Format eBook (PDF, galley)
Source from the publisher via Net Galley

Review: The Dead of Midnight by Catherine Hunter

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This is the sixth book I’m counting towards the challenge which requires me to read 13 Canadian books by 1 July 2011. It is yet another great book that I probably wouldn’t have stumbled across if it weren’t for participating in a challenge.

In a small town in Winnipeg, Manitoba a book club meats each week at a local restaurant to discuss a mystery novel (and eat dessert). They start discussing a new series of novels in which a murder always occurs at midnight but soon book club members start experiencing events that eerily reflect the plots of the novels. At the same time one of the club members, Sarah Petursson, begins to uncover the mysteries of her own past, including the death of her mother when she was only six years old.

I read this book in a couple of sittings and was hooked from the outset. Although the basic premise, real-life events mirroring those in books, has been done before there were more than enough interesting twists here that I didn’t get any sense of ‘been there, read that’. Undoubtedly this was helped along by the strong focus on Sarah’s exploration of her past. At first she is reluctant to dig into her murky memories of her early childhood but when she came into possession of some journals of her mother’s she became drawn to finding out about her mother’s life, almost all of which was spent on a tiny private island with only her father and sister for company. The inclusion of extracts from these journals was nicely handled and helped build the intrigue. Meanwhile the investigation of the current crop of crimes does not go terribly smoothly, mostly due to the lazy pig-headedness of one of the detectives assigned to the case, and it’s no wonder those book club members who remain alive grow more than a little frightened.

There’s a plethora of characters in the book, possibly a few too many to get into real depth, but even those who appear only briefly are well-drawn. Thankfully Sarah Petersson avoids almost all of the traps of being a female in danger in a mystery and her self-discovery and the way it impacts her character is surprisingly engaging. Her flighty (and flirty) cousin Morgan turns out to be made of tougher stuff than I imagined at the outset and the many possible culprits provide red herrings and entertainment in equal measure. The only real downfall was with the depiction of the police who seemed either to be lazy or a little too willing to break rules inconvenient to plot advancement but as they didn’t feature heavily in the story it wasn’t a terribly big issue.

Perhaps I was particularly drawn into this novel because I too belong to a crime fiction book club (though ours is not nearly as organised as this one in which members took it in turns to write presentations on the themes raised by the books they read) (and none of our members have been horribly murdered) but whatever the reason it certainly hooked me in from the outset. I found the book genuinely suspenseful and its evocative sense of location and the merest hint of something paranormal was reminiscent of some of Daphne du Maurier’s stories. I think this one would have appeal beyond die-hard mystery fans.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3.5/5
Publisher St Martin’s Minotaur [2001]
ISBN 03123083888
Length 360 pages
Format hardcover
Source borrowed from the library

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