The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: book-review

  • An Easter Post: Women in Prison, Agatha Christie’s Sad Cypress, and Dorothy L. Sayers’s Strong Poison

    I was halfway through Sad Cypress before I realized that the young doctor who had sought Hercule Poirot’s assistance was named Peter Lord. Lord Peter. A nice tribute to Dorothy L. Sayers in a book that follows the broad outlines of her earlier novel, Strong Poison. Sad Cypress was published a decade after Sayers’s book,…

  • Louise Penny’s The Cruellest Month: Literary Allusions, Easter, and the Near Enemy

    This will be a busy week of endings and beginnings and April Fool’s Day mischief. My writing energies are temporarily diverted elsewhere, so I’m re-posting last year’s Holy Week musings, with a quick diversion into True Crime to mark Palm Sunday today. Scroll down to skip a grim and very real story. Palm Sunday and…

  • Alafair Burke: A Crime (Writing) Family

    I’m nearly finished Alafair Burke’s new novel, The Note, which starts a bit slowly but then picks up, in a big way. And since I’ve never written on here about how much I enjoy both Burke’s fiction and (in a more moderate way) the prolific literary output of her father, James Lee Burke, this seems…