The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: book-review

  • Jessica Knoll’s Helpless

    According to her new book’s publicity, Jessica Knoll’s Helpless, due out in July, is a “smoldering erotic thriller with a singular, mind-bending ending.” Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance look. This is the third Jessica Knoll novel that I’ve attempted to read; I’m going to try the The Luckiest Girl Alive…

  • The Helplessness of Grief and the Trauma of Academia: Maria Adelmann’s The Adjunct

    As I was reading Adelmann’s campus novel, I was thinking about one of the most brilliant and personable labour organizers I’ve ever met, the late Miranda Merklein. I miss her. Like this novel’s protagonist, Merklein had realistic expectations of a middle-class life as a college teacher: not a cossetted existence, but decent health insurance and…

  • Vancouver Crime Fiction’s Sense of Place and a May 21 Event

    Several years ago, as I was starting a Creative Writing program at U of T, I took a crime fiction course with Vancouver writer Sam Wiebe; I’d taken a previous course on mystery writing with Gail Bowen. The two courses were completely different in delivery mode and approach, but both were terrific–and transformative. They made…