The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: books

  • Janice Hallett’s The Silent Appeal

    With thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC. Janice Hallett’s The Silent Appeal is due out in late August in Canada and the U.S., and in early September in the UK (which is, itself, a bit of a mystery for a new British crime novel: it’s more common for the North American publication…

  • 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…