STANDING IN THE SHADOWS by Peter Robinson

 

There’s something moving about reading a book from an author whose early work you know well, when it is published after he’s gone. So it is with Peter Robinson‘s last Inspector Banks novel.

This is another split-timeline story. The earlier sections are set in winter of 1980, when a university student is briefly a suspect in the murder of his ex-girlfriend. He’s trying to figure out what happened by questioning her friends and family. After a dramatic start, those plot sections rather devolve into a slow meander through 1980 university life with minor forays into the recent doings of the victim. We don’t much care about the student who is suspected, and we hardly learn anything to make us mourn the student who was killed.

The contemporary novel sections involve a years-old unidentified corpse that is turned up by archaeologists surveying the site of a future shopping mall. With no reason beyond mere curiosity to care about this unidentified collection of bones and bits of leather or metal, we can only plod along as Banks directs his team on lines of potential inquiry, occasionally buying them drinks, and generally showing why he’d be a nice boss to have. Old case threads and characters get some page time. Favours get called in from pals in high and low places. No more about archaeology, and the archaeologist rather fades away without leaving any impact, despite being one of the first (and only) interesting characters we meet. There’s a lot about music of the era, which bands were hot and which not, amid a few digressions into the spreading news that John Lennon was killed.

I found myself wondering how much of the manuscript was written many years ago and never quite reached publication in its original form. Could it have been updated with the investigation set in 2019, to feature the ageing Banks still cleaning up the mess from his previous case?

The book’s interesting enough in its way, and competent as usual, but not a ‘final book’ in any sense beyond the author's passing and the characters' occasional glances backward. We'll never know now how Robinson might have retired--or killed--his venerated Inspector, or what plans he might have had for the many sidekicks and side characters. Read it if you’re a longtime fan, if only for the poignancy of knowing it is the final book from a prolific and widely respected author.

 

#PeterRobinson #InspectorBanks #NetGalley #ARC #CrimeFiction #British 

Last Call at the Nightingale

Good Jazz Age atmosphere, a lively and believable heroine, and a dead body outside the Nightingale club make this book easy to fall into. The writing is competent, the characters well sketched from the start, and trouble unfolds around dance-loving Vivian faster than her cranky neighbour can think up her next complaint.

Questions pile up about people Vivian likes as well as those she can’t stand. The dead man lurks, tainting Vivian’s desire to return to the Nightingale even though she’s sure of her welcome by the friendly bartender, Danny, and fascinated by the enigmatic owner, Hux. Then there's the debonair mystery man who showed up right around the time of the murder and seems willing to buy Viv's between-dance drinks forever. And a flapper socialite's frustrated boyfriend. And Viv's equally frustrated sister, who stays home, works hard, and can't understand how Viv can risk police raids and poisoning by bootleg booze just to go dancing night after night.

The narrator doesn’t give a lot of inflection early on, and you have to listen carefully to the words to know which character is talking. But after a few chapters she settles into the voices, especially Vivian’s, and lets the story unfold through emotion as well as the words.

There are a few jarring switches in Vivian’s audacity/bravery that threw me off a bit, but overall this is a competent, well-crafted, and absorbing Jazz Age mystery.

 

#Netgalley #mystery #JazzAge #BlindPig #Speakeasy

Moonlight and Misadventure - 20 Tales of Mystery & Suspense

Moonlight and Misadventure

20 Tales of Mystery & Suspense

Edited by Judy Penz Sheluk

This third anthology from Superior Shores Press is packed full of quirky characters engaging in crimes and mishaps by the light of the moon. The authors come from across North America, the stories’ settings too, from the swamps of the Deep South to the snowy north of Canada.

Some tales revolve around up-to-the-minute technology while others - such as the quaint innocence of 1921’s Moonset  by Jeanne DuBois and a far from innocent tale, Just Like Pen Entwistle by Robert Weibezahl, stalking Hollywood’s most famous hill in 1932 - trace back decades. Seething starlets make way for bayou ‘boys’, good kids go a little bit – or a lot – bad. Any cop you meet on these pages could be good, indifferent, or rotten to the core.

There are heists gone wrong where characters get redeemed by love gone right, and those gone right at the expense of romance. Thefts range from the usual cash, jewels, Rolexes to an irreplaceable fine art study and all way the back down the value scale to a bit of Elvis tat that nobody but an obsessed collector would pursue.

Whatever the variety of crime story you enjoy, you’re sure to find something to enjoy for an hour in this atmospheric anthology.

 ·         Publisher ‏ : ‎ Superior Shores Press (June 16 2021)

·         Language ‏ : ‎ English

·         Paperback ‏ : ‎ 300 pages

·         ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1989495397

·         ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1989495391

 https://www.amazon.ca/Moonlight-Misadventure-Stories-Mystery-Suspense/dp/1989495397/

 

 

Homicide for the Holidays

Looking for a last-minute stocking stuffer? Something for that crime-obsessed brother-in-law? A vicariously murderous read to get you through this pandemic-challenged festive day? Here's a non-exhaustive collection of recent crime novels that explore Western Canada's culture, climate, & geography. 

Starting from the West Coast, there's The Lost Ones by Sheena Kamal that follows Nora, a traumatized transient & former foster child, as she searches for her missing daughter from the drenched gray streets of Vancouver to the icy white mountains of the BC interior. Or explore Vancouver’s fabulously beautiful North Shore in R.M.Greenaway’s ‘River of Lies’ (Dundurn Press) along with three jaded RCMP officers as they investigate a baffling murder and a missing toddler.   

 If your taste runs to hard-boiled investigations on the gritty streets, tour the worst parts of Vancouver, BC with A.J. Devlin. Former pro wrestler "Hammerhead" Jed Ounstead encounters tent cities, wrestlers, roller derby, and plenty of human detritus on both sides of the law. ‘Rolling Thunder’ (Newest Press) is the series’ 2nd outing.  Another wise-cracking Vancouver PI is 29-year old Dave Wakeland. In “Invisible Dead" by Sam Wiebe, Dave’s dogging the cold trail of his hot ex... straight toward a showdown with a cabal of Vancouver’s most deadly and powerful. 

Far from the crowded streets of the Lower Mainland, Interior towns may look idyllic, especially under a blanket of pristine Christmas snow. But don't let the purity of all that white deceive you: every town has a dark interior life, and none more than in Roz Nay’s ‘Hurry Home’ (Simon & Schuster). Child protection officer Alexandra Van Ness is loving her life until her troublemaking sister breezes back into town. Their shared past threatens to spill over into the present, tangling Alexandra in long-buried terrors just when she most needs her calm professionalism to save a child from imminent peril. 

Another small town with a dark underbelly is historic Nelson, BC in the Kootenay Mountains, setting for Lucky Jack Road (Mosaic Press) by J.G. Toews. When Jack Ballard, an elite mountain biker with a mile-wide mean streak, is found at the bottom of a ravine with his mangled bike nearby, intrepid reporter  Stella Musconi teams up with RCMP Sergeant Ben McKean to determine whether it was unlucky chance that ended his winning forever, or willful murder by someone even meaner than Jack.  

Cranbrook author DaveButler’s ‘Full Curl’ (Dundurn Press) features Jenny Willson, a caustic warden from Banff National Park who considers poachers and bureaucrats equally repulsive. If animal protection and environmental conservation are on your Christmas list, you can’t go wrong with this anti-poaching procedural by an author who worked the front lines against poachers in Canada’s best-known National Parks. On the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains there's J.E. Barnard’s Why the Rock Falls (Dundurn), in which a burnt-out RCMP officer and a disabled art historian team up to tackle the wilderness disappearance of a Calgary oil baron and the inexplicable drowning of a fading Hollywood starlet. 

For a love song to the prairies’ people, places, and history, visit ‘The Ancient Dead’ (Dundurn) by Barbara Fradkin. Set partly amid the Drumheller hoodoos, the mystery starts with a dinosaur bone hunt and delves into the dusty secrets of a prairie farming community that, over the decades, have seeped deep into Calgary’s oil-company office towers. North of almost everywhere in Alberta (but still only mid-province) we come to The RedChesterfield, a genre-bending novel by Edmonton’s Wayne Arthurson. All I’ll say is that spotting a red chesterfield in a ditch changes a bylaw officer’s life in far more ways than you (or he) expect.

Eastward one more time, to Regina, Saskatchewan and Bone Black, a horror-glazed novel about a Cree woman’s search for her missing sister, the dark paths she is pulled along, and the devastating toll paid by all Indigenous families in the ongoing loss and murder of their women and girls. Author CarolRose GoldenEagle is Cree Dene with roots in Sandy Bay, Saskatchewan. 

To finish us off with a lighter note, visit any of the Russel Quant novels by multi-Lambda nominee/winner and longtime Saskatoon resident Anthony Bidulka. Whether globe-trotting or home on the snow-swept range, Russel solves crimes, wines/dines, and finds romance, backed up by a cast of delightful secondary characters I came to love as much as my own family. 

Enjoy!