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.
Rockton is a town built on secrets. Everyone comes to this camouflaged Yukon haven with a colourful past and something to hide, be they victim or perpetrator, sociopath or healer. But what happens when the deepest of secrets are at risk of being revealed? Someone in Rockton is playing a deadly game and it’s up to Sheriff Eric Dalton and his partner, Detective Casey Duncan, to find out who it is and stop them, before fear and judgment rip this fragile town to shreds. With a population of 171, everyone has a secret, and only Sheriff Dalton has knowledge of them all.
We Rockton fans knew that one day there would be an end to this thrilling crime fiction series. When she released book six, New York Times best-selling author, Kelley Armstrong, told us she had a seven-book-contract. Big sigh. This is book seven and, yes, the people of Rockton have been given the word from their elusive governing council in the south that this is it. Their beloved Yukon hideaway is about to be dismantled; worse still, the townsfolks are tasked with the dismantling.
The story begins in the midst of this chaos with an unusual moment of calm—three peaceful days have merged into a friendly game of Dungeons and Dragons. It’s a beautiful July evening until the peace is shattered by a sign—a literal sign hanging in the street. “Will Anders is a killer. He lost his marbles and killed his army commanding officer and escaped to Rockton before they locked him in a loony bin.” Could it be true? What would you think if you saw a sign that revealed your town’s deputy sheriff was a crazy killer? This revelation triggers an escalating action that leaves scarcely a moment to breathe until the final page.
I appreciate how Armstrong provides a solid introduction to this book where she explains Rockton and the rules. “Residents come here under false names and false identities, and they must stay a minimum of two years.” Rockton is not new. It was created as a kind of commune in the 1950s, so it has its own history. The residents know the end is coming as the population has dwindled and no new folks have been admitted to this off-grid town in months. I’m going to miss Rockton. I’m going to miss these characters. I’ve followed Eric and Casey’s relationship from the very beginning, smiled through the introduction of their comical Newfoundland pup, Storm, and gritted my teeth through all the bizarre cases they’ve solved. This end is as tough for me, the reader, as it is for the residents of Rockton.
Also, in the introduction, Armstrong names the key characters and reminds us of their talents, skills, and jobs, many of which have nothing to do with each other. For example, Mathias, the town butcher, is a “psychologist with an expertise in criminal pathology.” Both skills come in useful in Rockton where every story involves at least one slightly bizarre murder. This book is no exception.
The stories for the most part are plot-driven. They’re crime novels so we spend most of the story inside Detective Casey Duncan’s head as she gathers clues and deciphers what they mean. Casey’s narration in first person present tense creates a sense of immediacy and illustrates how this brilliant woman’s brain fires. It’s taken seven books but we’ve come to know her, through her relationships with her dog, her partner, her sister, and her friends. Each book can be stand alone but I always find it’s richer to read a series in order and watch the character development.
Armstrong’s clear, tight prose is peppered with colourful vocabulary. I found myself looking up new words—slavering, moue, feminazi, tangentially. If you’re searching for an intelligent crime series steeped in nature and popping with psychopaths, look no further. The town of Rockton may be finished but the books live on forever.
What do you get when you cross an emergency-room doctor with an award-winning novelist? An insanely-twisted thriller that’s more connected than the vascular system.
White Lightning is book nine in the Hope Sze medical thriller series but reads like a standalone. It was my first Yi read but won’t be my last. The premise is simple—the complications are not.
Think of small things that pack a punch, and you’ve got Dr. Sze. Self-described as “five foot two and a quarter because of her ‘Asian genes’,” Hope is anything but diminutive. (And I have to wonder how much of Melissa Yi runs through the fictional veins of Hope Sze). She refers to herself as an “idiot savant sleuth” and definitely shows off her skills in this story.
When Hope and fellow doctors, Tori Yamamoto and John Tucker, take a weekend away from interning in Montreal, Hope’s platinum-haired fiancé, Tucker, insists they stay at the Rumrunner’s Rest, a historic inn in Windsor, Ontario. The Detroit River was once known as “Hooch Highway” as opportunists took to transporting alcohol across it from Canada into the United States during American Prohibition.
Right from page one, we know something’s up when the pragmatic Tori sees a ghost.
I love blended genres and that’s what’s brewing here—a murder mystery/thriller, with a dash of history, and a supernatural twist. Oh, and spiked with Rogue Con – a motley collection of theatrical villains, a stalker, the appearance of Hope’s recent ex-boyfriend (whom she still loves) AND the gruesome discovery of bones in the basement chimney.
But it’s not all fun and games.
Interwoven into the narrative is the story of orphan Edwin Jenkins, a six-year-old English chimney sweep, forced into servitude and early death. Edwin’s tragic tale is one of horror and exploitation. Later that theme replays with the introduction of a teen prostitute from Rogue Con.
Yi is a witty, playful writer who doesn’t shy away from spiking the text with expletives, sexy innuendos, and shots of pop culture. Her reactions to seeing her ex-boyfriend, in the basement at the unveiling of the mysterious bones, are priceless; in fact, the whole scene, wild rogues and all, is a comic tour-de-force. Twisted riddles on the title, White Lightning, are endless (I’ll let you sleuth them out) and the connections make for a meticulous mind-map. We even read a first-person interview with the original White Lightning who worked with the infamous Al Capone.
Technically the works of a medical crime writer, Yi’s Hope Sze thrillers have been recommended by The Globe and Mail, CBC Books, and The Next Chapter as some of the best Canadian suspense novels.
In this high voltage thriller, Yi weaves a tragic tapestry of exploitation, murder, mayhem, and revenge, spiked with comic relief. Don’t miss it.
I recently reread Widdershins, the 11th book in Charles de Lint’s Newford series (published 2006). At 560 pages, it’s a hefty tome. I fell in love with it in chapter one when Lizzie Mahone’s car runs out of gas at a lonely crossroads in the middle of the night. Of course, you know when you’re stranded after midnight at a crossroads near an “enormous old elm tree, half dead by a lightning strike” that something extraordinary is going to happen. For Lizzie, it’s a savage attack by bogans, nasty-pants faeries with sewer-mouths whose evil plans include stealing her car.
Fortunately for Lizzie, Grey, one of the corbae (bird) cousins, arrives serendipitously and saves her. But the bogans have been hunting and left their kill in the trunk of her car. Lizzie can’t stand to see the butchered deer, so buries the pieces under the tree, then gets her fiddle and plays a lament to honour the deer’s spirit. This touching act draws the attention of Walks-With-Dreams AKA Walker, who we discover is the father of Anwatan, the butchered deer. To repay Lizzie for her kindness, Walker tells Lizzie to call on him if she’s ever in need. Well, it doesn’t take long before Lizzie’s in need.
I tell you this because the rest of this massive story plays off these different types of creatures—the humans (Lizzie and her friends), the Indigenous animal people, and the Settler faeries who invaded this land with the Europeans.
Politics is rampant and the plot and its connections complex. At its core is the conflict between the settler fae and the Indigenous animal people who call themselves cousins. A massive war is brewing, fueled by the vengeful Odawa, a cousin from the salmon clan who Grey accidentally blinded by pecking out his eyes one day. He thought Odawa was dead. Odawa betrays the animal people and joins up with the fae who refer to the Indigenous cousins disrespectfully as “Green Bree” or “pluikers.”
Meanwhile, triggered by Anwatan’s murder, Minisino and his buffalo soldiers rise up in solidarity to revenge past injustices inflicted on their ancestors by the settlers. This story is an anthropomorphic retelling of North American history. Even Lucius, the Raven who created the world, makes an appearance at the height of the conflict.
But it’s not all about faeries, transforming animals, and politics. At its heart is the ongoing love story between Jilly Coppercorn and Geordie Riddell begun in The Onion Girl (2001). Jilly’s story is dark. In order to heal and release the past horrors that are stuck deep in her subconscious to become whole, Jilly must face her childhood abuser. A lengthy piece of this book takes place within Jilly’s mind or as de Lint calls it her “heart home”. Lizzie ends up in there with her, and the pedophile who abused Jilly joins them, as horrific as he was back then. When Del turns them both back into little girls and magically makes Lizzie’s mouth disappear from her face, it seems hopeless.
As I said, this book is dark and deep, but ends with a glimmer of hope and understanding. Charles de Lint says,
“I’m a writer and this is what I do no matter what name we put to it. Year by year, the world is turning into a darker and stranger place than any of us could want. This is the only thing I do that has potential to shine a little further than my immediate surroundings. For me, each story is a little candle held up to the dark of night, trying to illuminate the hope for a better world where we all respect and care for each other.”
Along with light, Charles de Lint pours his musician’s soul into his characters. Lizzie and her cousin Siobhan play fiddle in a Celtic band. When Siobhan is pushed down the stairs by a vengeful bogan and sprains her arm, Geordie steps in to help. Reading this book inspired me to take up playing fiddle. I play piano and some guitar, but I’ve longed to fiddle all my life. Geordie says:
“Music needs to live and breathe; it’s only pure when it’s performed live with nothing hidden – neither its virtuosity nor the inevitable mistakes that come when you try to push it into some new, as yet unexplored place. It’s improvisational jazz. It’s the jam, the session. The best music is played on street corners and pubs, in kitchens, and on porches, in the backrooms of concert halls and in the corner of a field, behind the stage, at a music festival. It’s played for the joy and the sadness and the connection it makes between listeners and players.”
I get it. I’ve heard it. I want it.
Some people disparage fantasy just on principle. They don’t understand the scope and complexity of art that’s caught up by a label created by marketers. I love how Charles de Lint gets around that.
“I now call my work ‘mythic fiction,’ a term created with my friend, Terri Windling, when we were sitting around talking, trying to figure out what to call what we write. She is a wonderful writer, and her fiction travels along similar roads to what I do. MaryAnn often says that Terri and I were twins in a past life; we have a lot of the same sensibilities.
“We liked the term ‘mythic fiction,’ which fits perfectly. ‘Urban fantasy’ doesn’t work because a lot of what I do isn’t set in an urban setting. ‘Contemporary fantasy’ could work, but it’s kind of boring and doesn’t really say much. Besides, in 50 years you won’t be able to call my books ‘contemporary’ fantasy. ‘Mythic fiction’ works because it has broader resonances and alludes to the heart of this fiction, which is, of course, myth. It has the right tonality because these are stories that have modern sensibilities, dealing with contemporary people and issues, but they utilize the material of folklore, fairy tale, and myth to help illuminate that. It also omits the word ‘fantasy’ — a term for which people have too many preconceptions. I’m not trying to knock fantasy, because I love good fantasy and have had great support from the fantasy community throughout my career, which I very much appreciate. But I’m trying to engage an even broader audience — people who normally don’t read fantasy, who get scared by the word fantasy or by those types of covers. I think a lot of people who don’t like fantasy just haven’t had the chance to have the right book put in front of them.”
I agree completely. I also write mythic fiction. My books are rarely set in urban areas, so I’ve stopped saying I write “urban fantasy” although sometimes I still get stuck there as do all stories that are contemporary but venture into the realm of mythic creatures and the supernatural. My witches seek the wild places faeries frequent and dance under a mythic moon, so yes, it’s more mythic fiction than anything else.
The only thing I don’t understand about this book is the cover art. A church steeple and floating women? It’s a little too Practical Magic for me. Widdershins means to travel in a counterclockwise motion. Witches dance widdershins to unravel a spell or a circle they’ve cast. I understand what this means to the story. Jilly Coppercorn travels backward to unravel the spell cast over her mind by her abusive brother. She must untangle her future from her past. But the cover art? I think the artist never actually read the manuscript, and just went with what they knew about the word.
This book is so much more than its cover. So don’t let that scare you off. Venture into the mythic fiction of Charles de Lint. You’ll be captured by the first chapter. You might even get inspired to play the fiddle like Cape Breton legend, Natalie McMaster.
Cherie Dimaline never intended to write a sequel to her dystopian novel, The Marrow Thieves, but after earning the Governor General’s Award and the Kirkus Prize for Young Readers’ Literature, she went into schools to talk with teens about writing the book. When the kids asked if there would be a sequel and were told “no”, they booed her. They wanted to know more about seventeen-year-old Frenchie, his girlfriend Rose, and their road family. They wanted more “coming to” stories, more knowledge of this past/future apocalyptic world, and how these characters would survive this Indigenous holocaust by living as a tight, loving, bush community.
A bone-chilling tale of what could happen, Hunting by Stars is set in the not-too-distant future; perhaps 2050, certainly within the lifetime of teens reading today. When humans have all but destroyed the planet and been sickened by plague, the non-Indigenous people stop dreaming and go insane. Settler scientists experiment and find a cure. Woven within the DNA of Indigenous peoples is the ability to dream. Once it becomes apparent that this precious fluid can be extracted from bone and turned into a dream-enhancing serum, Indigenous people become a commodity to be hunted and harvested. Medical centres, termed “schools,” are constructed like space-age hospitals, and “recruiters” enlisted to track down and detain anyone who might hold the cure. Worse still, some of their own kind are “turned” and sent into communities to bring in their own people. Indigenous people should be proud to do their part in healing the world, shouldn’t they? This situation puts Frenchie’s small family on the run in northern Ontario, heading north into the wilderness, or what’s left of it.
This tale is, in some ways, prophetic; in other ways, a horror story. If you’re squeamish to tales of imprisonment and torture, this story may not be for you. If you’re anxious and afraid of the coming climate change—which is already revealing itself in floods, droughts, fires, hurricanes, and extreme temperatures—this story might not be for you. I actually had to put it down and stop reading during our recent B.C. floods. It became suddenly too real.
But know this: within the evil perpetrated by one race upon another, despite the genocide so graphically portrayed, and the ferocity of Mother Earth’s reaction to humanity’s ignorance, this is also an inspiring story of survival and hope. Case in point—though Canada is still intent on producing the serum organically, the President of the United States has put a halt to the genocide and scientists there are working on a synthetic cure. For Frenchie’s family, the underground railroad south might hold more promise than the sketchy north.
The intensity of love shown between the members of Frenchie’s family, the heart-wrenching loss, deep betrayal and depravity shown by the other, and the gritty reality of living a bush-life on the run, sink deep into our souls.
This is a political book, told in the language of reconciliation—settler versus Indigenous—and from the point-of-view of the hunted. It’s the settlers who created the problem, yet the Indigenous people are being mined as the solution. The schools, forced imprisonment, government-sanctioned hunting of Indigenous people of all ages, and the medical testing and torture that goes on within them, are all based on the Indian residential school model of the none-too-distant past. As such, past is future, and now a thin weave between.
Cherie Dimaline is from the Georgian Bay Metis Community and this story is her voice. She is both a dreamer and singer; her cinematic, poetic prose transports us where “bees swarmed broken streets, made hives out of green-clotted houses, the wallpaper shot through with moss” (389); while her fertile imagination warns us of our own ghoulish capabilities.
Hunting by Stars pulses with a rhetoric of resilience and reclamation. As Nature reclaims the Earth, so Frenchie’s family works to reclaim its culture and language, cherished word by word, action by action, dream by dream. Both books should be read and discussed in schools, for we’ve left this generation with a massive task, and books such as this and The Marrow Thieves are roadmaps to reclamation and hope.
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