Join me for a glimpse Into the terrifying minds of mystery and thriller writers as we read aloud from our novels. For some of us, crime really does pay.
I bought the paperback edition of In Restless Dreams from Wren Handman in March 2020. We read together at an Author Reading in B.C. and she was so funny and entertaining, I had to buy her book. (Mini-spoiler: Wren read the part where Sylvia eats “the brownie” at a party—an act that shows her hero’s innocence.)
Written in casual first person, we spend the whole book in Sylvia’s head. She’s a normal teen with some extraordinary problems. Her parents are separated, so after her mother almost commits suicide, Sylvia and her thirteen-year-old brother, Eric, are sent to live with her rich attorney father in the Upper East Side, New York. Oh, to have such problems—a mansion, a father who doles out credit cards, and a hot chauffeur to shuffle you to and from prep school!
The first half of the book follows Sylvia’s challenges adjusting to the rich privileged, ofttimes, cruel kids at her new rich prep school. About half-way through the book, Sylvia eats “the brownie” and suddenly starts seeing things she shouldn’t—even given the nature of “the brownie.”
The back-half of the book chronicles her adventures as the new Phantasmer—a being who can change Fairy with her thoughts. She’s introduced to The Stranger from the Unseelie Court and the hot, blond green-eyed knight from the Seelie Court, and we are entertained with the history and complications of Fairy.
There’s a thread of Alice in Wonderland running through the text. My favorite quote: “Artists and thinkers imagine so strongly, they warp bits of the world to match their creation. Lewis Carroll dreams of Jabberwocky and somewhere a fae is born who truly hates Vorpal swords.” Sylvia’s entry into Fairy is much like Alice’s into Wonderland, and this is exactly what Handman’s done in this book—dreamed a Phantasmer and so she is born.
Judging by the lengthy set-up, I’m assuming this is a series. Hurray! There’s already a hint of a love triangle between Sylvia, The Stranger, and the Green-Eyed Knight.
A Yukon camping getaway in December with a Newfoundland dog and a wolf-dog tells you how much Casey and Eric need a break alone together. Eric Dalton is the Sheriff of Rockton, a Yukon town of two hundred rebellious refugees and Casey Duncan is the detective. There is one more law officer in this town, Sheriff Will Anders, who’s holding down the fort while his friends escape for two days. Literally. Rockton is a fort in the wilderness, complete with walls and gates. People have to apply to live in Rockton and everyone accepted is there escaping something life-threatening, be they perpetrator or victim or both.
Casey and Eric met in book one, cohabited in book two, and now, in book five, they’ve settled into a marriage. So, as couples do at this stage in their relationship, they’re contemplating what comes next. Children. However, Casey was beaten so badly by a gang of men when she was a teenager, she isn’t sure she can conceive or carry a baby to term. This obsession with parenthood and babies is a theme that gets triggered in the first scene and carries through to the end.
Eric has gone hunting with the wolf-dog and Casey wakes up alone in the woods. Well, alone except for Storm, her bouncy one-hundred-and-forty pound Newfoundland dog who is now sixteen months old and learning to track. Casey and Storm go to collect wood for the fire, and Casey hears something. A baby crying. Except there’s nothing anywhere but a heap of snow in the middle of the clearing. A trained homicide detective, Casey is immediately suspicious, then she begins to dig. What she uncovers is bizarre and heartbreaking: a murdered woman with an infant beneath her jacket clutched to her chest. The rest of the book is a chase to discover murderer and motive.
The baby is tiny, a month old at best—a winter baby—born in a time of hardship. She’s healthy though, despite being buried alive in the snow, freezing and dehydrated. Someone’s been nursing her, though not the dead woman, who Casey quickly discovers is a wildling with tattoos.
This story delves into life in the various communities outside Rockton, each with its own morals, rules, and cultures. Besides the folks who live in the First and Second Settlements, there are traders and tribes of hostiles roaming the woods. And as Casey pursues the killer, we meet representatives from all these communities.
Would you ever contemplate living alone in the woods? Some people do. Maryanne, a professor who was once Rockton’s biologist, left the town of two hundred to live with another woman and their partners in the woods: a doctor, a wilderness guide, an eco-builder, and a biologist. They had plans and hopes and wilderness experience until the hostiles attacked, killed the men, and took the women.
Maryanne, who Casey meets and brings back to Rockton, explains that the hostiles also have rules. Sex must be consensual and women choose partners as necessary protectors. Women are not allowed to bear children, so if they get pregnant, it’s terminated. Rape is forbidden. The female shaman conducts rituals and makes the teas: two types … one that creates a state of “tranquil unreality” and another for special occasions that ramps everyone up into a “wild, primal frenzy.”
A complexity of this story is that Eric and his brother Jacob were born to settlers. When his parents left him alone to go trading, Sheriff Dalton and his wife took him to Rockton and “adopted” him without his parents’ consent. Eric’s background naturally affects the way he lives. He was too young to remember but still wonders about his real parents.
Much crime fiction is plot-driven—follow the clues, solve the murder—but in this book more than in her other four novels, Armstrong balances plot and character development. Casey grows with every encounter and reveals more of her hidden personality. Throughout the book, we are privy to several different types of relationships. People come to the Yukon to escape the south but bring their problems and prejudices with them.
As usual, Kelley Armstrong delivers a tense, suspenseful mystery, with her characteristically clean, tight prose. With so many eccentric suspects, Casey is kept guessing and second-guessing right until the big reveal. In the end, Casey and Eric get their quiet moment alone, and it’s time to contemplate love and families and what they want next. This series could go on forever. Let’s hope it does.
This novel is my literary pick for 2019. I rarely buy fiction, especially hardcover novels, but this one jumped off the shelf at my local Indie bookstore, and when a book claims you like that, you have to take it home. Besides, the black, silver and hot pink cover had me spellbound. I read it twice, cover to cover, back to back. First, to find out what happens to our feisty Métis hero, Joan of Arcand, and then again to savour the poetic brilliance of Dimaline’s writing.
“If her heart was a song, someone smashed the bass drum and pulled all the strings off the guitar. Notes fell like hail, plinking into the soft basket of her guts.” This is Joan when she sees her lost husband, Victor Boucher, sitting in an old green chair on the stage at a revivalist tent in a Walmart parking lot in Orillia, Ontario. She’s been searching for him for eleven months and six days—since they had words and he stalked off into the woods. Only this man wearing Victor’s skin and speaking with Victor’s voice isn’t Victor. He’s Reverend Eugene Wolff.
Then Joan meets Thomas Heiser. In his blue suit with his gold watch, gold eyes, and too-white skin, Heiser is a resource development specialist who runs the Ministry of the New Redemption. Like those who’ve come before him, Heiser is intent on taking coveted land from the First People by using the mission system. If the resource companies can convert the traditional people, it’s so much easier to take their lands, build a pipeline, dig a mine. Somehow, this creepy stalker, in his daffodil-yellow tie, has stolen Victor, memories and all, and is using him as a frontman to undermine his own people.
Then the unthinkable happens. As in “Little Red Riding Hood” Joan’s grandmother, Mere, is killed by a wolfish creature, a rogarou.
At night, the rogarou wanders the roads. He is the threat mothers use to keep their children in line. To warn their girls to stay home. To keep their boys on the right path. Pronounced in Michif as rogarou, it’s derived from the French loup garou. Wolf Man. “A dog, a man, a wolf. He was clothed, he was naked in his fur, he wore moccasins to jig.” A shape-shifting monster, the rogarou comes to hunt, though he’s not quite the European werewolf. For one thing, you don’t become a rogarou simply because you get bit. It’s far more complex than that. And this wolf can dance.
As genres go, Empire of Wild could be labelled urban fantasy. It fulfills expectations. It’s contemporary, thrilling, sexy, mysterious, mythical. But I prefer the term mythic fiction. Like Joan of Arc, our Joan is a tenacious warrior of French Catholic descent, but it is her Métis Elders, Mere and Ajean, who steep her in medicine.
Carrying a ground-up salt bone for protection, Joan ventures into the Empire of Wild to slay the rogarou who’s killed Mere. And she’s determined to reclaim her husband from the creature.
Joan’s sidekick and protector is her chubby, bespectacled, twelve-year-old nephew, Zeus. This young sweetheart believes his Aunt Joan is his soulmate because he makes her happy. Zeus is always there for Joan even as she’s sponging her grandmother’s blood off the rocks. And when she leaves Mere’s trailer taking only a deck of playing cards tied with red ribbon, a bundle of sage, and her Swiss Army knife, Zeus joins Joan in her mission to bring Victor home.
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Like her hero, Cherie Dimaline is brave and fearless, pouring history, politics, and religion into her cauldron, then stirring with a branch of magic realism and terror. This is an Indigenous story told by an Indigenous storyteller. Close relationships bonded by blood, work, and land. Family. Sweetgrass. Tobacco smoke. Cherie Dimaline is from the Georgian Bay Metis Community in Ontario where this story is set. It’s evident in the bones, pores, and flesh of the landscape, and in the wildly beating hearts of the people whose territory the rogarou stalks.
After a jaw-clenching climax full of surprises, we’re left with a non-traditional but hopeful epilogue. You’ll have to read it to find out what that means. Mind: you may never go out in the woods again.
In his latest crime novel, Vancouver author, Dietrich Kalteis, offers a nail biter as dark and gritty as a Kansas duster. The story would seem apocalyptic were it not set in 1930s America. A wind of sympathy buffets the underdogs as they try to eke out a living in a dead, inhospitable land ravaged by drought, banks, and the Ku Klux Klan.
When I read the title, Call Down the Thunder, a song kicked up in my mind — “The Rainmaker” — a 1969 Americana ballad by Harry Nilssen. But, though this rainmaker’s “cobb-buster” cannon is significant, Eugene Hobbs doesn’t make much of a blast himself. He has the technology, but not the touch.
In the end, I decided the protagonist was Clara Myers, a feisty woman in her mid-twenties who wanted to be a dancer but fell for a Kansas dirt-farmer. The story chronicles Sonny and Clara’s struggle to survive outside forces, as well as their own relationship. “Been married to a man more married to the land than he is to me,” Clara tells her mother. Several years into the marriage, Clara, childless and despairing, still longs to shine centre stage.
Sonny, a third-generation Kansas farmer, who inherited the family farm, is the “everyman” of his time. While Clara wants to escape, Sonny wants to stay. The problem is, everyone else wants him gone. Between the Knighthawks of the Great Plains (KKK) and the bank, Sonny has to use his wits and his fists frequently. Willing to try anything to keep the land his daddy’s buried beneath, Sonny finds himself embroiled in a couple of cash grabs that put further pressure on his marriage.
What really draws the reader into this story is Deitrich Kalteis’s characteristic writing style. Breaking the “rules” of contemporary fiction, he twists language to keep the phrases fluid and the plot spinning. There’s a fair amount of “head-hopping” as Kalteis writes using an omniscient viewpoint — meaning, he sometimes reveals more than one character’s thoughts and feelings within a scene. There’s nothing wrong with writing omniscient — it’s classic and fits well with this period piece.
He also switches past and present verb tenses frequently, like we tend to do in our own minds. It’s a trademark technique that drops the reader into the action. For example, when Clara questions the rainmaker about how he makes rain, we see this. “Crooking a finger, he wanted her to follow to the rear of his truck, flapping back the musty canvas.” It’s a way of cutting out all the little words so there’s room to pepper the prose with specific details and sensory images.
Deitrich Kalteis
Kalteis must time travel. How else can he know all the product brands and describe them in such detail they could be sitting on our shelf? Nine pages in, Grainger’s Mercantile is written like a eulogy to bygone days: “Life Savers for a nickel, Red Bud Soda Water, Tower Root Beer, Ace High hair pomade …” Clara’s come to the store to use the phone. She wants to tell her momma that she’s leaving Sonny. And she does leave Sonny. Unfortunately, the truck breaks down and she gets back to the farm just in time to experience a duster blowing, a flaming cross by their mailbox, and their barn burning down. That’s all in scene one — two chaotic pages that propel the reader right into the action and the character’s plight.
There’s a not-so-subtle political commentary blowing in the background of this text. The White Knights of the Great Plains don their masks and wage war on anyone who’s not them, including the unique cast of a traveling circus show. We also hear about FDR’s new deal: schemes to create work for down-and-out Americans. Like Sonny and Clara, the whole state seems to be on the move. I’m reminded of John Steinbeck as I read: The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men. The language is similar. Some words are now considered offensive, but at the time, this was the way things were and the Klan are the villains. They talk as they think. Nowhere does Kalteis slip outside the 1930s to be politically correct. He wants us to experience the chaos, the horror, and the despair of the moment.
This book is a crime novel driven by Sonny’s desperation, so I don’t want to give away any secrets. But there are some twists and surprises, like the introduction of several new characters from “The Happy Mustard Show” two-thirds of the way through the book. There’s a reason for it. A big reason.
But it’s Clara who’s the biggest surprise of all. Brave, strong, and independent, she might not have become a dancer, but she certainly takes centre stage.
