Tag: book-review
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Eve Zaremba and the Canadian Lesbian Detective Novel
Toronto writer Eve Zaremba passed away last month. She was a major figure in Canadian writing and social justice. Her fictional sleuth Helen Keremos, who made her debut in 1978 in A Reason to Kill, is generally acknowledged to be the first lesbian private eye. (An American book I haven’t yet read, M.F. Beal’s Angel…
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Louise Penny’s The Black Wolf
As The Black Wolf opens, Clara is struggling with the completion of her latest art project, a series entitled Just before something happens, which anticipates one of the key themes of Penny’s latest novel: how to portray the time that precedes a dramatic, or traumatic, event? How, even, to know if one is in the…
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Gail Bowen’s The Solitary Friend
In The Solitary Friend (ECW Press), Gail Bowen revisits themes and characters that have peppered her mystery series over more than three decades.
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Uzma Jalaluddin’s Detective Aunty
Here’s something new and different, and very welcome: a murder mystery (cozy-ish) set in a multicultural Scarborough neighbourhood with a widowed Indo-Canadian woman in her late 50s as the plucky heroine. Uzma Jalaluddin is a Canadian author and journalist who has written acclaimed fiction and one play; this is her first murder mystery. Kausar Khan’s…
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Widows and Orphans by Kate Hilton and Elizabeth Renzetti
The former Globe & Mail journalist and her writing partner, a psychotherapist, teamed up last year for their first novel. Set at a failing newspaper in a small Ontario town, Bury the Lead was quite fun. The town’s theatre festival is in shambles after their problematic leading man collapses on stage. Amateur sleuth Cat Conway…
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Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot and The Sequel
Four years ago, Jean Hanff Korelitz published The Plot, to near-universal acclaim. Now she’s followed up with The Sequel. Both are crime fiction in a sense, as murders take place and there are ample thrills. In these funny, knowing books, genre conventions and the distinctions between “literary” and “popular” fiction receive close scrutiny. Yet there…
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Victoria in the Spring: Iona Lam’s Fowl Play
Spring is real estate and cherry blossom season in Victoria. Locals search in vain for affordable new homes, and tourists flood off the cruise ships and ferries in search of souvenirs on Government Street. Iona Lam’s recent novel, Fowl Play, brings these two together. The first in a series, it is a cozy mystery that…
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The Murders in Great Diddling: Katarina Bivald Revises and Parodies the Cozy
The Edgar nominations were announced last month, and Katarina Bivald’s The Murders in Great Diddling is up for the Lilian Jackson Braun Award for best new cozy mystery. In the cozy, as the name suggests, the violence is off-stage and not off-putting. The victim may be widely disliked as in Bivald’s book, or the crime…
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Newspaper Coverage of Crime Fiction
I’ve been grumpy for some time about how diminished the Globe & Mail‘s book coverage has been, lo these many years. I miss having a Books section, with a weekly column on crime fiction by Margaret Cannon. (Dream job!) That’s down to once a month or less, and it’s more of a quick round-up. But…
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Solving Plot Problems
Most of my focus has been on revising a novel draft that I’ve despaired of, these past two years, since I completed my 75,000 or so words. [Worse than feared: 104,665, which is, for my chosen genre, a baggy monster of a book, and unpublishable as a first novel.] I could see the plot and…
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 