Review: Sitting Lady Sutra by Kay Stewart

Opening sentence: RCMP Constable Danutia Dranchuk pinned another crime scene photo to the board, this one showing Esther Mike’s distorted face, her eyes and neck bulging from the red ribbon used to strangle her.

More than a mystery, Sitting Lady Sutra is a culturally fascinating tale of families forced apart – and drawn together – by violent crimes. While the investigation into a serial killer forms the backdrop for this novel set in 1996 Victoria, BC, the characters and their interactions are the greater draw.

Constable Dranchuk is intent on proving herself as Special Investigator into the serial killings of Aboriginal women while maintaining an unspoken rivalry with Corporal Farrell and a guilty avoidance of her parents’ phone calls. Ex-con Ritchie, torn between hope and fear over his daughter’s whereabouts, is putting off phoning her mother for fear of what he might hear. Surinder Sharma juggles his fractious sons, furious mother, and conflicted, half-Anglo niece in between mentoring Danutia through her investigation. Troubled Trav watches his mother die of cancer and drink.  Behind them are other ex-cons, other cops, parks workers, party people, Aboriginals young and old, all going about their lives while Sitting Lady Falls rush and ebb with the cycles of seasonal rainfall, and the Gorge waterway seduces the unwary with its deceptively smooth surface, and death walks among them.

While the natural waterways flow through the story, racism runs like a sewer through the lives of these characters. It is balanced by the beauty of Emily Carr’s art and by delicately performed cultural rituals. This feels like a much larger story than is contained in the slim hardback put out by Touchwood. I look forward to reading the next in the series, “Unholy Rites,” in hopes of resolution to some of the issues haunting Corporal Dranchuk both personally and professionally.

Sitting Lady Sutra

#2 in the Danutia Dranchuk Mystery series

By Kay Stewart

Touchwood Editions 2011

Review: The Slickrock Paradox

by Stephen Legault

Opening line: She was not there.

The first paragraph of this claustrophobic, taut tale takes us, paradoxically, to the wide-open Utah desert, where Silas Pearson is searching for a missing woman. He knows his quest is likely hopeless. This expanse of red sandstone may look flat but it is creased with crevices, some of them hundreds of feet deep. An unwary hiker might break an ankle stumbling across a narrow rift and die of heat exhaustion under the sun, or fall into black depths and drown as the next rainstorm funnels through the gully. Yet Silas keeps looking, obsessively mapping the terrain a few days each week, marking off his search areas in 7.5 inch grid squares on the small-scale topographical maps that paper his living room walls. He has done this, we learn, for the past three-plus years, seeking his wife.

By the end of Chapter One, I shared Silas’ obsession, drawn in by his close observation of the rock itself, by his attention to every nuance of weather and geography that might offer a clue to her end. My desire to learn his wife’s fate, and to understand the web of emotions that drove his obsessive hunt, carried my eyes from sentence to sentence, page to page, while the sere landscape built itself in my mind.

The Slickrock Paradox takes us through terrain as unforgiving on the outside as Silas’ inner country is to him. This is a novel for those who love wilderness as passionately as they do a gripping, suspenseful mystery.

The Slickrock Paradox(2012)

#1 in The Red Rock Canyon Mysteries

By Stephen Legault

Touchwood Editions