Welsh-Canadian crime aficionado, Cathy Ace, has been writing up a storm—in this case, a veritable dust storm—featuring her mystery-solving avatar, Cait Morgan. In Book Twelve, the criminal psychologist and her ex-RCMP husband, Bud, fly to Arizona as guests-of-honour of the Desert Gem, a posh new restaurant run by their sweet chef-friend, Serendipity Soul.
This is my favourite Cait Morgan crime romp for a few reasons.
Landscape. The landscape truly becomes a character in this novel. This story really couldn’t be set anywhere else. Before heading to the Desert Gem, Cait and Bud tour Frank Lloyd Wright’s desert oasis, Taliesin West with its “emerald grass and turquoise waters . . . rust-coloured paint . . . and saguaro cactus.” The Sonoran Desert in Arizona is a stunning location, rife with its own mythology, and like the infamous Sedona, attracts artists and eccentrics.
Imagination. Linda, leader of the Faceting for Life movement is the personification of a Navajo Goddess, the Turquoise Woman, right down to her turquoise toes. She actually dips her feet in dye weekly to keep them that way. She wears turquoise robes, and her dig is decorated in real turquoise. Linda is the cult leader until she’s discovered dead in her bed from an apparent, elaborate suicide. Zara then assumes her mother’s position and channels her dead father, Demetrius Karaplis. Ace’s foray into cult research is obvious—“let’s not drink the Kool-Aid”—but feathered by her brilliant imagination. The devotees “sway and hiss” their mantra, “Facet and Face It,” while Ace deepens our experience with an exploration of the “fourteen Critical Facets,” terms such as “buffing” (of the facets), and the billion-dollar business buffed by Zara using her father’s words.
Language. Speaking of words, Ace obviously had tons of fun naming her characters and acknowledges that several of the names pay homage to literary friends including KSue, Dru Ann, and Linda Karaplis. Chapter titles are a witty smorgasbord of oxymorons—“Serene Turbulence, Rustic Elegance, Unsettled Settling, Abnormally Normal,” and my favourite, “Uncommunicative Communicator.” We all know one of those.
The faceting language sets us squarely inside the cult. And, if that’s not enough, the text is peppered with unexpected terms and Britishisms (I’m unsure as to which are which) to remind us that both Ace and her counterpart, Cait Morgan, grew up in Wales—“chalk and cheese, mugged a salute, kerfuffle, slanging, yompy, lumpen substance.” Sleepy Bud makes “truffling” noises and Cait wears white “spudgy” shoes. Ace’s affinity with language surprises, delights and leaves us craving more.
Eco-everything. The Desert Gem is created in “pueblo revival architectural style” and illuminated by dancing flames of fire bowls around a central plaza. No electric lights are permitted after dark in this Earth-conscious community. Facetors and visitors live in small simple “digs” circling the plaza. Ace invites us into Cait and Bud’s dig with a vivid description that has me, for one, wanting to travel south. The Desert Gem is an eco-testament with a solar farm, waste-water treatment area, bio-digester, gardens, pool, amphitheatre, communications hub and refectory. Who wouldn’t want to stay awhile and buff their facets?
It’s all well and good until the bodies start piling up—all apparent suicides of major faceting players.
If you haven’t read any of Cathy Ace’s cozies, Turquoise Toes is a great place to begin. Each can be read alone, but your appreciation of Cait and Bud can be enriched by living their adventures in sequence. Cait is a strong, independent woman gifted with an eidetic (photographic) memory which allows her to decimate the villains triumphantly in her big reveal. Ace really kicks it up a notch in Turquoise Toes.
This is an incredible novel. Poetic. Prophetic. Powerful. I’m not even sure how it ended up on my Kindle; perhaps it was on a free books newsletter and I downloaded it based on the glorious front cover. I love watching jellyfish. They’ve always been my favourite tank at the Vancouver Aquarium. Of course, there they were captive jellyfish contained for our amusement and we, watching from the outside, felt safe.
Here, jellyfish are marauders and we are their amusement.
“The jellyfish rule the ocean now. With limited predators, warm oceans and over 700 million years of evolution, they’ve become sly at adapting to the elements.”
This impactful apocalyptic novel—the first in Jillian Webster’s The Forgotten Ones trilogy—begins in futuristic New Zealand, where the writer now lives. The book falls into that newish realm we call eco-fiction or eco-myth. The writing is poetic and literary; the plot, adventurous with enough romantic suspense to keep you up at night, and for those of us who love magic, Webster even adds a dash of the fantastical. Maia, the feisty twenty-year-old female protagonist, is something of a nature goddess. In this passage, reminiscent of the ancient Gaelic “Song of Amergin” Maia discovers her destiny and then must accept it, and wear it.
“You are the reincarnation of a living earth, long forsaken. You are her. You are the soul of the trees, the heartbeat of each crawling ant, the breath of every humming bee. You are the music of the babbling brook and the pulse of each undulating wave. You are the spotted clouds of deep red sunsets and every reflective crystal of white mountain tops. You are the delicate drop of rain and the crushing avalanche of ice.”
The tale begins with a prologue—a nightmare—in which a mother she cannot remember, beckons Maia to follow her destiny. This recurring dream precipitates Maia’s decision to leave the comfortable safety of the mountain haven her grandfather built for her, after he dies. Her choices? Live alone. Marry some old man from the North Island Community. Or follow her mother’s voice and set out to seek her destiny.
“Life as a whole tends to work like this; the most beautiful things in this world have been born from disaster.”
The philosophy is tribal. We’ve heard it before; yet we always forget. And the consequences of forgetting is a planet flooded due to melted poles, overrun with jellyfish. Powerless cities rot beneath the sea, and desperados run disparate communities. It can be triggering, given the state of Earth these days. Yet there is a glint of hope in this torpid sea of jellyfish. A rumoured Utopia —The Old Arctic Circle—The New World.
“Before The End, there was a lot of talk about this anomaly, this place on earth that for thousands of year had been covered in ice. A wasteland—no man’s land. Once the glaciers melted, there were these massive uninhabited pieces of earth at the very beginning stages of what they were like millions of years ago.”
Imagine it. A tropical paradise as yet pristine and unaffected by human greed. Wouldn’t you search for it? I would.
Be aware this book could trigger you. It will certainly make you think. When Maya dives off a pirated freighter into the sea off the west coast of California and lands in a wavering island of garbage, I almost stopped reading. It was too real, too much to dwell on. I know we’re dumping tons of plastic and garbage into the ocean daily. How long will it take before the garbage rises to the surface and becomes an island of nets, plastic, and death?
The best part for me was discovering that there is a book 2—The Burn of a Thousand Suns. I hope that people; at least, the “right” people hear the message Jillian Webster offers before it’s too late.
Griffiths’s latest Ruth Galloway archaeological crime mystery sends us forward in time as well as backward. She’s now Head of Archaeology at North Norfolk U and her daughter, Kate, is thirteen. DCI Nelson, Kate’s father, and the love of Ruth’s life, is still living with his wife and helping raise their three-year-old son (although his parentage is questionable if I remember correctly). But, that’s the kind of guy Nelson is. But hey, come on, don’t you think it’s time you lived your truth, Nelson?
There’s plenty here for readers who enjoy unravelling a murder mystery along with Nelson’s crack detective team, while delving into the lives of old familiars—Ruth & Nelson, Cathbad & Judy—and there’s a new archaeologist in town, David Brown, whose enthusiasm and connection with The Night Hawks make him suspect, and Ruth terribly annoyed.
The Night Hawks are a group of amateur archaeologists and metal detectorists, who wander at night searching for prize loot buried under England’s soil. They discover a Bronze Age hoard along with a three-thousand-year-old body on the beach, and nearby another body—a man recently deceased. Then they discover a bloody scene at a spooky farm house that appears to be a murder-suicide carried out by the husband, a scientist who’s not a very nice guy at all. Add to this soup, the legend of the Black Shuk, a giant black dog with red eyes that prowls the vicinity of Black Dog farm where the alleged murder-suicide occurred, and you’ve got an up-all-night-read brewing.
ellygriffiths.co.uk
One year, I’ll read this whole series from beginning to end again. I’d love to see this series come to television. Producers, please.
It’s been some time since I read an installment of the DreadfulWater Mysteries. Too long. The Red Power Murders (2017) was my first. With the latest Thomas King mystery about to launch, I decided to catch up with Obsidian, released 2020. Plus, I love the shiny black volcanic rock, so was enticed by the title. While reading Thumps DreadfulWater’s adventures, I could hear King’s voice narrating, and that got me thinking about his mocking comedy style, and where I first heard it.
Way back in 1997, King created CBC Radio’s Dead Dog Café, where he played straight man to Jasper Friendly Bear and Gracie Heavy Hand at the fictional town of Blossom, Alberta. I used to listen and laugh along with the fifteen-minute CBC episodes on the car radio while driving my daughter to taekwondo. If you’ve never heard Indigenous satire at its finest, you can catch episodes on youtube. I’d previously read Medicine River and Green Grass, Running Water while attending Trent University’s Indigenous Studies program. The latter is a 1993 Trickster novel, nominated for the Governor General’s Award. I add this preamble because the DreadfulWater Mysteries echo the same wry, ironic tone that characterizes King’s writing while offering a classic who-done-it mystery that will appeal to all those who love crime novels.
Obsidian takes Thumps back six years to a tragic time when he was a deputy sheriff and his girlfriend, Anna, and her daughter, Callie, were killed by a serial killer on the Northern California Coast. It doesn’t get much worse than that. They never caught the guy, who killed eight other people during his killing spree. Perhaps that’s why Thumps has given up law enforcement to become a photographer—something that Thomas King does exceptionally well. Check out his photos here. DreadfulWater’s ancestry is Cherokee, as is King’s. I feel an alter-ego lurking here.
Thumps returns to Chinook, only to discover that the producer of a true-crime reality TV show who’s investigating “The Obsidian Murders” had come there to talk to him but been murdered. Moreover, Maslowe’s found with a piece of obsidian in her mouth—the trademark of the original serial killer. Is he now in Chinook or is this a copycat killer? Either way, the news leaves Thumps feeling both troubled and curious.
Naturally, there’s a café in Chinook populated by funny friends. The banter between Thumps, Cooley Small Elk, and Moses Blood is reminiscent of the characters at Dead Dog Café. The story is largely plot-driven and heavy in dialogue—humorous dialogue—which is no surprise since King is also a screenwriter. I’m surprised the Thumps DreadfulWater Mysteries haven’t been purchased for screen yet. With their Canadian/Indigenous humour they’d make a splash—think Schitt’s Creek merged with Blackstone.
Maslowe has left Thumps a name—Raymond Oaks—who, it turns out, was Anna’s husband before he was sent to prison for life (robbery-homicide) and released on a technicality just around the time of the killings. Thumps is enlisted by Sheriff Duke Hockney to help investigate the murder and joined by his slick deputy-friend, Leon Ranger.
Not long after, Thumps is approached by a strange trio of film producers—Mercer, Gerson, and Shipman—who’ve come to Chinook to make a cable movie based on the Obsidian murders. “People, it seemed, liked to be disgusted, liked to be terrified, and broadcasters without borders had quickly learned to mine this deep and disturbing vein in the American psyche” (89). King is a masterful storyteller who writes ironically about his own work, and peppers his stories with political opinion, satire, sage wisdom, and the occasional belly laugh. If you’ve never read him, this is a great way in.
There are several characters embedded in this edition who I want to know more about. That means going back to the beginning with DreadfulWater, originally published in 2002. Obsidian can be read as a standalone mystery but would definitely be richer with more background and description. These characters can quickly become old friends worth knowing. Check out The DreadfulWater Mysteries for a seductive and respectfully irreverent read you can’t put down.
“He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘You’re wild, not broken.’’’
A perceptive horse metaphor lopes through Book 2 of Kades’s Alberta Hearthstone series. The hero, Colt Tanner, is a gallant bull-rider and horse trainer who prefers to “start” a horse rather than “break” it. Truly chivalrous, the tall, sexy, Tanner sweeps disgraced MI6 war correspondent and courier, Lillian Kensington, off her feet when she arrives in the Canadian Rockies with PTSD, a fearsome past, and her nineteen-year-old niece, Sophie, in tow. In the beginning, I had trouble relating to this wealthy privileged Brit who travels with an elite troop of bodyguards, but I was struck by her intelligence and independence, as was Tanner. There is a reason for this protection—though her testimony has just sent him to prison, Lillian’s ex-lover, double-agent Fernando Martinez, has vowed to kill her.
Kades says she writes “eco-thrillers” but this book lands squarely in the romantic suspense genre, as she offers readers a sexy, sensitive romance in contrast with an insane escaped terrorist seeking revenge; RCMP officers; Colt’s brother who received a near-fatal gunshot while working in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service; a top notch special force who guard the wealthy and elite Miss Kensingtons; Martinez’s thugs; plenty of suspense and murderous threats.
Strong women feature. Lillian’s Scottish grandmum, Dame Maighread Evans Coille Kensington is a “ballsy political force” and runs the British estate with an iron fist. I was hooked early on by the promise of a historical mystery when Lillian discovers her great aunt’s seventeen-century fur-trading journals and shares Obedience’s leather-bound tomes with us—one of which is a “grimoire” of women’s knowledge. Lillian is intuitive and has been experiencing visions since her teen years. Though she can feel the energy pulsing through the book, she was struck blind by love in the case of Martinez; a truth that makes her distrustful of men and herself now.
Streaks of feminism color the pages. It’s grandmum who sends the women to the Rocky Mountains, Sophie to train as a biathlete, and Lillian to read the journals and discover her past. Kades has taken the concept of ecological restoration known as re-wilding and re-branded it to mean “returning to the core of who you are, the real you, where your identity is you, not your career, or what others think you should be.”
A Calgary archaeologist and Indigenous Knowledge study facilitator turned fiction writer, Kades is a two-time Energy Futures Lab Banff Summit storyteller. She lands her characters in a world of leather and horses, sunsets and mountain vistas, rodeo clowns and fierce bulls, and brings life to such classic Alberta scenes as the Calgary Stampede and trail rides in the Rocky Mountains. A strong writer with a flair for description, she sneaks in a few allusions to icons such as Gretsky, and the odd Canadian joke. If you’ve never been to Alberta, trust me, you’ll want to go cowboying after reading this book; perhaps even find your own cowboy.
Wild Not Broken is a standalone novel but, as with all series, could be a richer read after reading the first, Kiss Me in the Rain. Book three, Not an Easy Truce is scheduled for a June 2022 release, which leaves you time to catch up on the first two, and still enjoy what promises to be a delightful summer read.
