Category Archives: Canada

Review: AMUSE BOUCHE by Anthony Bidulka

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AmuseBoucheBidulkaAnthon15633_fAfter three or four quite harrowing reads in a row I felt the need for something lighter. Not so light as to be completely without a possible murder (heaven forbid) but light enough to hopefully not need my near-empty tissue box. And so I turned to the first book in a series featuring Canadian private detective Russell Quant. The story is told from Quant’s point of view in a very readable, chatty style and  soon we learn that he left his job as a uniformed police officer a year ago to establish his business and that it’s proved to be slow going. Tracking down someone’s favourite cooking dish is hardly the makings of an investigative legend. But things look up when Russell is hired by one of the city’s power players, Harald Chavell, because the man he was to marry, Tom Osborn, disappeared on the day of the wedding. Initially Quant heads off to France with the belief that Tom has chosen to take the couple’s planned honeymoon itinerary on his own but when this avenue proves fruitless Quant returns home and begins an investigation in earnest.

Although in the end there was rather a lot to like about this book for me it started rather slowly. The trip to France dragged, primarily due to what seemed to me a blindingly obvious, and not very credible, plot device. However when Quant returns home and begins to treat the case like a normal investigation into a missing person, interviewing friends and family, sussing out Osborn’s colleagues and so on, I started to really enjoy what is essentially an old-fashioned whodunnit.

Russell Quant is a likeable character offering plenty of wry observations on his world and behaving very normally. Although he dabbles with a bit of breaking and entering he’s not one of those private investigators who puts himself in mortal peril every few pages. Like the two men at the centre of his investigation he is gay but this is just a fact of life rather than a Big Issue (capitalisation deliberate) for the novel. Bidulka does do a good job though of subtly incorporating this aspect of his characters’ lives into the story by showing the different ways they display or hide their sexuality depending on their work and social circles.

Once past the hurdle of the fairly clunky opening I thought the storytelling was solid, with Quant laying out an array of potential culprits in Tom’s disappearance including his business partner, Chavell himself and possibly even members of Tom’s family. There’s plenty of social life too for Quant who has a selection of interesting friends and a loveable dog. Other than the weather I didn’t notice anything that marked the book as peculiarly Canadian but the small city setting seemed spot on to me.

Overall this offered just what I was looking for: a story that managed to be light and enjoyable without talking down to me and a decent example of what this author has to offer. I’ll happily read the next one in the series.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Thanks to Bill from Mysteries and More from Saskatchewan for introducing me to this fictional resident of his home town.

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My rating 3/5
Publisher Insomniac Press [this edition 2011, original edition 2004]
ISBN 9781554830404
Length 4785 locations!
Format eBook (for kindle via my iPad)
Book Series #1 in the Russell Quant series
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by
http://reactionstoreading.com
 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Review: THE GUILTY PLEA by Robert Rotenberg

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On the morning Terrance Wyler’s divorce trial is due to start his body is found on the kitchen floor by his four-year old son’s nanny. He has been stabbed seven times and it isn’t long before suspicion turns to Wyler’s soon-to-be ex-wife Samantha. In fact the evidence piles up so quickly and convincingly that even Samantha’s own lawyer seriously considers all the angles of her pleading guilty despite her claim that she did not kill her husband.

Essentially this is a book with the deceptively simple goal of exploring the implications of someone pleading guilty to a crime they claim to be innocent of. With the evidence stacked against the accused is it better to take the certainty of pleading guilty to a lesser crime (manslaughter over murder for example) or to risk everything on being found innocent by a jury? It’s hard to imagine too many scenarios more frightening than the prospect of spending many years in prison for a crime you know yourself to be innocent of but how much faith would you put in the justice system to get it right?

All the players you would expect are present in this engaging and their back stories are teased out nicely: the victim and his family, the investigating detectives, the accused’s lawyer, the prosecutor, And of course the accused woman herself. All have secrets, fears and prejudices that impact their view of the case and in many cases their willingness to tell the whole truth. Rotenberg does a particularly nice job of making the reader empathise for those characters who are forced to reveal things about themselves they’d rather have kept secret.

But the real strength of the book is in its courtroom scenes where Rotenberg has obviously drawn on his own experiences to capture the genuine drama of the setting. He makes it clear that no amount of preparation can guarantee how things will play out in court as there are so many variables that even the best judges and lawyers cannot control. Readers are drawn into the ups and downs in mood and tension each day of the trial and the way cases swing to favour one side then the other based on a myriad of small details. The tone of voice used by a witness, the amount of research undertaken by an investigator, the decision to call a witness whose memory or presentation style might not work entirely in your side’s favour and a dozen other things will all play a role in the outcome of a trial like the one depicted here.

I picked up this book based mostly on the recommendation of Bill at Mysteries and More. I was intrigued because Bill is a practising Canadian lawyer who thought this Canadian legal thriller represented the legal system he works in intelligently. I like the idea of legal procedurals and thrillers but find many of them incredible so I was curious to see if I too would find this one believable. Happily I did and enjoyed it a lot though I’m not sure if the lesson the lawyer in Rotenberg wants readers to take away is that justice is all a bit of a crap shoot but that is the impression he left me with.

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My rating 3.5/5
Narrator Paul Hecht
Publisher Whole Story Audiobooks [2011]
ASIN B005QRCFFK
Length 11 hours 12 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #2 in the Old City Hall series
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by
http://reactionstoreading.com
 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Review: This Thing of Darkness by Barbara Fradkin

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Retired psychiatrist Samuel Rosenthal is beaten to death late one Saturday night in an Ottawa alleyway. Officially the case is being investigated by Sergeant Marie Claire Levesque, new to the Ottawa Police, and she becomes convinced the doctor was killed as part of a mugging gone wrong. A group of black youths was spotted on a surveillance camera and Levesque spends her energies on tracking them down. Her boss, Inspector Michael Green, is not sure the case is as clear cut and he also starts to investigate the case, enjoying the feel of being back out in the field. He tackles several lines of enquiry including the notion that Rosenthal was killed by one of his former patients or possibly even his own estranged son. Green and Levesque disagree on process and priorities for most of the novel which impacts the investigative process at several points in the story.

I found this a fairly confusing book to read, with an over-abundance of plot lines that all received fairly cursory attention. For my enjoyment the book would have been better served by focusing more in-depth on a couple of these only, though I’m sure this is a matter of personal preference. An aspect that really grated on my nerves was the inclusion of the possibility that the motivation for the crime was one young Muslim man’s extreme fundamentalism. There is absolutely no evidence of any such thing and the thread peters out into nothing at all, but that didn’t stop Inspector Green throwing out a few random “facts” about Muslim extremism.  The young man in question was born in Somalia and had experienced sustained violent abuse at the hands of a parent and the case does touch on the possibility that this upbringing had an unexpected impact on the boy but there was plenty of scope for this to be explored in more depth rather than yet another go-round of the ‘Muslim = terrorirst’ theme. I can’t even begin to imagine how truly awful it must be for the vast majority of Muslims who are perfectly normal, well-adjusted people to have their religion automatically linked with the notion of terrorism whenever it is mentioned.

This is the seventh book of the Inspector Green series and I did feel a bit like I was attending a party uninvited as there were a fair few oblique references to past events. That aside though the focus on the personal lives of the various members of the team was a stronger element of the novel, though I must admit to finding Green both unlikeable and not entirely convincing. At one point for example he his indirectly responsible for the death of an innocent young girl and is at least partially to blame for the heart attack of a colleague. He seems to shrug off both of these events with only the most cursory of nods to any emotional impact on himself and neither incident changes the man’s behaviour at all. I found this a little hard to swallow.

In the end I suppose this was a perfectly serviceable police procedural but I didn’t find anything in it that stood out our would make me want to read more of the series. I do appreciate this is probably at least partly a result of coming to the series so late but I do think a series should be able to be joined at any point in its progress.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This Thing of Darkness has been reviewed at Reviewing the Evidence

Apart from a liberal use of the words loonie and toonie I didn’t notice anything particularly Canadian about the novel, but I’m counting this as book 2 of the North American leg of my Global Reading Challenge for the year

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My rating 2.5/5
Publisher Napoleon and Co (this digital edition 2009)
ISBN  9781926607146
Length 344 pages
Format eBook (ePub)
Book Series #7 in the Inspector Green series
Source I bought it

This post is published at http://reactionstoreading.com if you are seeing it at another site then it has been stolen and/or used entirely without permission.

Review: Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny

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Armand Gamache is Chief Inspector of the Sûreté du Quebec and acknowledged as a fine policeman. As this book opens however he is on leave, recovering from the physical and emotional scars left by events that we don’t know the details of until well into the book. He has gone to Quebec City to stay with his former boss and to conduct some historical research. This activity leads him to become involved in an investigation into a local murder. Although not yet ready to return to work in an official capacity his involvement in this interesting case does provide him some respite from reflecting on the terrible events that have led to his being on leave. At the same time he has become concerned that the resolution to his last case, depicted in The Brutal Telling, might have been incorrect so he asks his colleague Jean Guy Beauvoir, also on leave and recovering from injuries he sustained in the same events that still affect Gamache, to return to Three Pines and see if he can spot something the investigative team missed.

Louise Penny is a consistently good teller of stories but she has outdone herself here, juggling three quite distinct stories without a thread dropped or a wobble made. The re-investigation into the last Three Pines murder is probably the simplest of the stories told and stems from everyone’s belief that the man who went to prison for that murder wouldn’t have behaved as stupidly as it appears he did. Jean Guy is told to approach the re-opened investigation with the assumption that the man is innocent and see what else he can find out on that basis. Unlike Gamache Jean Guy has not been a big fan of the odd little village and its quirky inhabitants but it seems to offer just what he needs for his recovery.

In Quebec City Gamache is doing some research at the Literary and Historical Society library. This peculiar institution is home to all the books and personal papers which capture the history of Quebec’s tiny English-speaking community. The building, the collection it houses and the people who look after it have all seen better days. When Augustin Renaud, an eccentric character who has spent his life searching for the burial site of Quebec’s founder, Samuel de Champlain, is found in the sub-basement of the building Gamache is asked to become involved in the investigation by the elderly librarian. She thinks he will be more sympathetic to the English than other French people. I must admit to finding this story particularly engaging, involving many interesting historical tidbits and a thoughtful depiction of the separatist movement (as well as much walking around the historical city by Gamache and his adorable sounding dog Henri). Fittingly this is a case that is solved mostly by old-fashioned policing.

The final story is the recounting of the events that have led to Gamache and Jean Guy being on leave. Penny has for the most part resisted the temptation to indulge in too much sentimentality here, which for me makes it all the more compelling. Told mostly via Gamache’s remembered conversations with another of his colleagues, with occasional input from Jean Guy, this thread is a contrast to the case unfolding in Quebec City, involving very modern problems and the latest policing techniques.

For me this series has not, in the past, quite reached the ‘must read’ list primarily because I found its hero a bit too perfect and its fictional setting a bit too quirky. Here though we spend less time in quirky Three Pines and Gamache’s perfection is a little tarnished (if only in his own eyes) which made the book a much more credible and satisfying read than its predecessor. The intertwining stories had me hooked from beginning to end and I adored Adam Sims’ narration, complete with mild French accents where appropriate (le puff, le pant as my favourite cartoon character would say).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Bury Your Dead has been reviewed at Mysteries in Paradise

There has been talk of late in the book blogosphere about visiting in real life locations that appear in books and I couldn’t help but smile when Armand Gamache talks in Bury Your Dead about walking through the old part of Quebec City and coming across ‘Canada’s most photographed building’. I went to Canada as part of my first overseas trip as a 20-year old (approximately 100 years ago) and, yes, I took a photo of it too (I certainly couldn’t afford to stay there). The building is now the Chateau Frontenac Hotel and has always been a luxury hotel since its opening in 1893.

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My rating 4/5
Author website
http://www.louisepenny.com/

Publisher ISIS Audio Books [2010]
ISBN 9781445008967
Length 12 hours 15 minutes
Format Audio CD
Book Series #6 in the Armand Gamache/Three Pines series
Source I borrowed it from the library

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: 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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
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 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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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

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