by Wendy Hawkin | Dec 3, 2018 | Book Review, Canadian writers
Vicious bikers. The Irish mob. A family of squatters. A clever police detective. Death Count 26.
Some landscapes summon evil and once there, it lingers. Ragged Lake was a German POW camp during World War II, and then a mill town owned by O’Hearn Forest Products. Now, in its death throws, it’s transformed into something you don’t ever want to encounter, except perhaps in fiction.
Ron Corbett is a rare breed: journalist and poet. His detailed knowledge of war, of crime, of people and their nightmarish capabilities, fuses with a talent for sensory language and visceral description to lift the story off the page. Like a shotgun blast. This is a crime novel and something else—a genre called “rural noir”—a black day in the country and no picnic. Corbett writes in omniscient third-person mixing viewpoints to create a fast-paced, plot-driven, page-turner. The characters don’t change—there’s no time for that.
It begins with a triple murder. Special Forces soldier Guillaume Roy, his woman, Lucy Whiteduck, and their little girl, Cassandra, are murdered in the ramshackle cabin they built on the shore of Ragged Lake. They are squatters on O’Hearn land and keep to themselves as much as possible. Much of the backstory is revealed through the journal Lucy leaves with an old Cree woman three days before her murder: her not-so-idyllic childhood living in the Five Mile lumber camp run by O’Hearn, where her Cree father was foreman; her intimate connections with the Irish mob from Corktown; her therapy sessions; her relationship with Roy, and their escape into the wilderness. There, by the shore of Ragged Lake, for a moment, Lucy experiences peace: “Love. Work. Family. The fine high rise of that. Those were our days.”
Burley police detective, Frank Yakabuski comes to investigate the murders with two young Ident officers. Yakabuski discovers that the Popeyes are operating a giant methamphetamine lab in the defunct survival school. He figures the squatters found the lab and were executed by the bikers. Perhaps. But that, as the cliché goes, is only the tip of the exploding iceberg.
Ottawa author, Ron Corbett says: “If you’re a writer, whether fiction or non-fiction, unless you’re writing about a place that you’re familiar with and that’s important to you, I don’t know why you’re doing it.” Corbett has spent his life travelling and writing about the Ottawa Valley and Algonquin Highlands. Because he’s created a “fictionalized Northern Divide” all the time I was reading, I kept wondering where I was. Now I know. Ragged Lake lies on the southern border of Algonquin Park—one of my favourite places in the world. In 2000, Corbett camped there and wrote a newspaper feature based on his experiences. The author is most known for The Last Guide, his autobiography of Frank Kuiack, Algonquin Park’s last remaining fishing guide. In Ragged Lake, Corbett takes his experiences as a journalist and spins them into fiction.
photo from http://algonquinadventures.com
Corbett is also well acquainted with war stories, having written First Soldiers Downabout Canada’s deployment to Afghanistan. Both Detective Yakabuski and Special Ops Guillaume Roy bear the grisly scars of war and military training. Sometimes it’s hard to read. Roy’s experience in Bosnia, for example, is almost too real.
Toronto publisher, ECW, uses the acronym “Extreme Cutting-Edge Writing” and that’s what you’ll find here. Grisly, raw, evocative fiction based on experience and a sense of place…and what a place.
As reviewed in the Ottawa Review of Books, December 2018
by Wendy Hawkin | Nov 14, 2018 | news-events
In October, I enjoyed sharing the stage with some wonderful readers at Western Sky Books for “All Hallows Story Night”. Creepy, icky, ghostly, sexy, and beautiful, we heard a range of stories around the Halloween theme.
If you think REAL book stores are a thing of the past, or you’re someone who loves to hold a paper book in your hands, do come and explore this shop. It’s absolutely crammed with books, old and new titles, and every genre you can imagine. If you’re looking for something unique, check their website where everything is listed. I can’t even imagine the work involved in setting up a shop like this!
And watch for upcoming events at westernskybooks.com
by Wendy Hawkin | Nov 10, 2018 | Book Review
Seventeen-year-old Skye Thorne plays with paranormal. Though she pretends to be a psychic—like Sherlock Holmes, Skye uses her observation skills to wangle her way through tarot card readings. Legally named Candi, by her strange, single mom, Skye needs the cash to escape to New York after graduation. She’s made plans with her wealthy best friend, Drew. Skye and her mom live on the poor side of this small Midwestern town, and though she works shifts at Burger Barn, and earns lunch tickets by helping in the milk and cookies counsellor’s office, Skye hasn’t saved a cent. Though, she has accrued a fair amount of information about her peers, since she has access to their files.
A strong female protagonist, with questionable moral values, Skye Thorne has a barbed sense of right and wrong. A part of me wants her to be a “good girl” and do the right thing; instead, Cook has given us a real girl with flaws and real-world problems.
Money is what motivates Skye to participate in the kidnapping of Paige Bonnet, whose rich father is a judge and Senate-hopeful. Newsflash: Paige is no “good girl” either. Skye’s task is to lie and manipulate her way into working with the police as a psychic, to drop just the right hints at just the right time to ensure Paige’s plans succeed. With her experience, it should have been easy. Unfortunately, Judge Bonnet refuses to pay his daughter’s ransom, and then, a body turns up. When Skye’s annoying mother weasels her way into the case, the whole thing turns upside down…like “the hanging girl”.
Skye must solve the crime before her deception is revealed and fingers start pointing in her direction; otherwise, the hanging girl could easily become the hanged girl.
A dark murder mystery, The Hanging Girl is also an American teen novel, with all its angst, tragic twists, and social stigma. Eileen Cook, known for her YA thrillers, grew up in Michigan (like Skye Thorne) but now calls Vancouver home. She teaches writing at Simon Fraser University Writer’s Studio Program and works as an editor—facts that are illustrated in her prose. Written in first person and peppered with references to teen life, the reader becomes immersed in Skye’s contemporary world of Amazon, Pop-Tarts, and Diet Coke. But, beneath the mundane allusions lies something sinister. Cook once worked counselling people with “catastrophic injuries and illness” which might account for some of the psychological Girl on a Train vibe in this novel.
In the end, this book left me mulling over tragic Shakespearian heroines and wondering: what’s a girl willing to do to survive?
Eileen Cook won the John Spray Mystery Award in 2018 for The Hanging Girl. Congratulations, Eileen Cook!
As posted in The Ottawa Review of Books December 2017 edition
by Wendy Hawkin | Nov 9, 2018 | Book Review
Two best friends with differing social backgrounds. A senior year trip to Italy. A charming Italian tour guide. And a fatal accident.
Or was it an accident?
One minute, Jill Charron is anticipating the trip of her dreams, and the next, she awakens in a hospital bed in her hometown. Except six weeks have passed and she has no memory of her romantic Italian adventure. No memory at all. Her lifelong best friend, Simone, is dead—killed when the car Jill was driving careened off a walled road in Tuscany. And then the bomb drops. The Italian police want to extradite Jill Charron and charge her with murder.
Just as an aside, in Greek mythology Charon is the ferryman of Hades who takes the souls of the deceased across the River Styx into the land of the dead. Charon exacted a coin for passage and those who did not pay the fee might be left wandering for a century. Is Jill this Charon? Did she ferry Simone into the land of the dead or leave her wandering on the shore?
The mind is a complex creature. It can protect us by hiding what we can’t accept or bear to know. It can distort things. What really happened on that mountain road in Tuscany? “The truth,” Eileen Cook warns us on the front cover, “is how you tell it.” This need to know “the truth” is what propels the story and keeps the reader turning pages.
Cook leads us through a maze of viewpoints in an attempt to unravel this truth. What I find most interesting about this book is how she accomplishes that. Obviously, Jill lends her first-person perspective to the story—but it is limited by amnesia. She is an unreliable narrator. All Jill can really cling to is the notion that she would never kill her best friend, not “with malice.” It’s just not possible. Others think differently.
The Italian police believe Jill is guilty. She had motive, means, and opportunity. There was nothing wrong with the car, no bad brakes, no steering problem. Jill’s father, a rich businessman, hired a private plane to whisk her away from the hospital in Italy and bring her back to American soil where he could protect her. And, in their mind, this is an admission of guilt. Then, he also hired a hotshot lawyer to defend her and create a public profile. The public are easily swayed and there’s been a media frenzy for weeks.
This psychological mystery is as twisted as the Tuscan streets. We read police interviews with various friends and Simone’s grieving parents, the eulogy for Simone, a forensic psychology report that assesses the girls’ friendship, texts, emails, Facebook posts, media reports, and the extremely damaging Justice for Simone blog. The clever interspersing of these various bursts paints a picture of the relationship between Jill and Simone and fills in some of what occurred during the six weeks leading up to Jill’s awakening. Everyone reveals something—an opinion, a stray fact, an eye-witness report. And we are left wondering if it is possible that Jill IS guilty.
The novel’s unsettling ending bookends the troubling beginning and we are left wringing our hands over this tragedy and wondering what is the truth?
Eileen Cook teaches writing at Simon Fraser University Writer’s Studio Program and works as an editor. Her prose is flawless. In her last life, she counselled people with “catastrophic injuries and illness” something that gives her credibility and insight into Jill’s injuries and recovery process.
As posted in the Ottawa Review of Books November edition.
