The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: book-review

  • Don Gillmor’s Cherry Beach

    The Literary Review of Canada doesn’t cover all that many crime novels, but Cherry Beach, a 2026 book published by Biblioasis and written by a veteran Canadian journalist and novelist, deserves to be treated as an exception. This is a taut, atmospheric book, and it’s an indictment of class interests and racism. Kevin Jagernauth’s perceptive…

  • True Crime: The Difficult Life and Tragic Death of Writer Barbara Sorel

    The early twenty-first century has become more forgiving of difficult women, at least in literature. Novels like Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs, as well as the complete oeuvre of Otessa Moshfegh, have gradually acclimated readers to interesting, spiky women, women who know what they want (but who make life difficult for other people). I’m reading…

  • Rachel Monroe’s Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

    I came across Monroe’s book while seeking comps (comparable titles) for my own work-in-progress, which is a bibliomemoir: a life story told through reading and, in my case, crime fiction. It’s an expanding genre, and I highly recommend Guardian culture writer Lucy Mangan’s excellent Bookworm and Bookish. Other examples include Austen Years: A Memoir in…