Gail Bowen began writing her Joanne Kilbourne series after a few serendipitous events made her think that writing might be a way to earn more money for her growing family. Bowen was an English professor at what is now First Nations University in Saskatchewan; it was initially a federated college, part of the larger University of Regina.
And she’s given her engaging and interventionist protagonist a number of her own traits, while making her experiences quite distinct from Bowen’s own life in others.
What they have in common: Toronto private school and university background; a move to Saskatchewan to support a spouse’s career aspirations; involvement in left-wing provincial politics; an academic career.
But Joanne Kilbourn, widowed young when her politician-husband is murdered, is also decidedly different from Bowen, who has joked that she has enjoyed making Joanna both more fit and more nosy than she herself is. And those traits are very much on display in Bowen’s third novel in the series, and possibly the most grim, The Wandering Soul Murders. In later books, Bowen has returned to the topic of prostitution that she raises here, but in a very different light: the most recent novel, for instance, features a loving relationship between two people who met when one was working as an escort.
But this novel is about the trafficking of children, and Joanne’s (and Bowen’s) moral outrage fuel a strong plot.
Regina professor Joanne Kilbourn’s son Peter has just reunited with his first girlfriend, an ebullient women in her twenties who is several years older than Peter and who clings to him–and to his mother.
Jo is not thrilled. She finds the girlfriend clingy and obnoxious. But she’s mother of four, and she knows better than to interfere, so when she packs up the car to take the family to her eldest daughter Mieka’s engagement party weekend, Christy is at Jo’s side, beaming. The good mood doesn’t last long: when a radio news story announces the discovery of a young girl’s body–discovered a day earlier by Mieka, just outside her catering company–Christy is dismissive. The girl was merely a “whore”–not someone whose life is valuable.
In The Wandering Soul Murders Bowen’s outstanding series really begins to gel. It’s a confident and accomplished set of novels from its inception with Deadly Appearances, but the first two books focus more closely on other people’s families: the mystery of the sudden death by poisoning of a Ukrainian-Canadian politician, and (in Murder at the Mendel), the complicated chaos that ensues when Jo’s childhood friend, now the noted artist Sally Love, returns to Regina to reclaim her young daughter.
This third novel is more firmly focused on Jo’s own family. She’s now the adoptive mother of Sally’s daughter, Taylor, a gifted artist in her own right. And she’s juggling parenting duties with work and community obligations, as well as a new gig as a television political panelist. Joanne also has her first romance since the death of her politician husband, who was murdered several years earlier in what appeared to be a random attack.
Then the cottage weekend, which starts so promisingly, is marred by Christy’s death by drowning, an apparent suicide. Jo helps her son Peter cope with his grief and his deep sense of guilt that he was being tugged towards marriage by Christy, who claimed to be pregnant (but is not, as Jo soon learns).
This is not an easy book to read.
The murders alluded to in the title are those of several young women, some only in their teens. The discovery of two of those corpses is described in graphic terms.
There’s also a scene where Jo asks to be left alone with a body in its coffin so that she can surreptitiously check for a tattoo.
Some of Bowen’s readers don’t appreciate her matter-of-fact approach to sexuality and violence, or the earthy eroticism that is part of Jo’s very rich and very busy life. But I think these are some of her real virtues in both description and characterization.
Just by giving us a middle-aged female amateur sleuth who has great sex, Bowen has broken down some crime fiction stereotypes.
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 