Join us this afternoon from 3:00 – 5:00 pm Pacific time for this Virtual Launch.
I’ll be introducing one of my favourite gods during the Open Mic Event (starting around 4:15)
For more info and to register go to Event Brite or, if you prefer, just join through this Zoom link
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.
As reviewed in The Ottawa of Books, April 2020
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.
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.
As reviewed in The Ottawa Review of Books, February 2020
If you think there are no great Canadian authors, explore past editions.
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.
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.
As reviewed in The Ottawa Review of Books, December 2019
I haven’t posted much lately because I’ve been binge-reading Kelley Armstrong’s Cainsville series. I’m impressed. I decided to try it, as I love her Rockton series and I had the chance to meet her at Creative Ink in March. This series is exciting and devilish and very clever. It’s also the closest series I’ve read to my own Hollystone Mysteries. Elements are similar. We’re definitely in the realm of sexy urban fantasy with a twist of murder. It’s also mythic and arises from Celtic folklore. Faeries. Where I write of the Irish Sidhe (shee), Kelley writes of the Welsh Tylwyth Teg, the Cŵn Annwn, and something called the Sluagh. Same powerful and mysterious Celtic beings. Two different islands.
Right off the top, let me say that the one thing lacking is a Pronunciation Guide. It’s frustrating having to guess at the proper way to say a Gaelic word, even in your mind. Welsh is as tricksy as the fae. The author mentions that Cŵn Annwn is sounded as Coon Anoon, but as for the others, I know my inner voice is mispronouncing. In Book 5, when the Sluagh appear, I thought it could have been pronounced slow or slew with a silent gh, but no. The word is apparently spoken as sloo-ah. (I had to google it.) I’ve been pronouncing Tylwyth Teg as till-oo-ith teg. I know that w creates an oo sound. But that might be wrong too. Thus, the need for a guide.
Two of these fae factions have their own kings. For the Cŵn Annwn, it’s Arawn, King of the Underworld. He presides over spectral hounds and directs The Wild Hunt. Gwynn ap Nudd is King of the Tylwyth Teg AKA King of Faerie. These are creatures associated with the Welsh Mabinogion tales and early Arthurian legends.
The spooky town is brilliant. Cainsville. Located just outside Chicago, Illinois, it’s in seemingly sleepy small town America. Most people know the biblical story of Cain and Abel, who were the first two sons of Adam and Eve. Cain, the farmer, and Abel, the shepherd, both made sacrifices. God favored Abel’s and rejected Cain’s. Jealous and bitter, Cain killed his brother and was then cast out. Apparently, he made it as far as Cainsville. If you’ve read Beowulf, you’ll know that Cain is the father of all monsters, including Grendel, the beast our Anglo-Saxon superhero comes to slay. Since the Beowulf poet was Christian, those monsters involved anything pagan, including faeries. In Irish myth, the fey have been called “fallen angels”—they who fell from God’s grace along with Satan. Knowing this, opens up the series and the town to all kinds of shenanigans.
In Book 1 (Omens) we are introduced to Olivia Taylor-Jones (born as Eden Larsen.) She’s a heroic misfit like all of Kelley Armstrong’s leads. A strong woman with mystical skills because, of course, she has fey blood. Almost all the characters are fey in some way. Liv sees and interprets omens. As Liv, it’s hard to sympathize with her. She’s grown up pampered and proud in a wealthy Chicago family, studied Ivy League Victorian literature, specializing in Sherlock Holmes, and has a mansion and a mother to return to when she’s done slumming it in Cainsville. The twist is, Olivia began life as Eden Larsen. When her serial-killer parents were convicted for ritually murdering four couples, little Eden was adopted by the Taylor-Jones. In Omens, Liv’s secret is exposed and she becomes fixated on learning the truth. Are my parents really serial killers or were they framed? This thread weaves through all five books.
To uncover the truth, Liv connects with the handsome attorney who defended her parents. If he wasn’t so emotionally stunted, she’d be sleeping with him in Book 1. Like his namesake, Gabriel Walsh, is indeed Olivia’s angel. And, one can only hope, her someday lover. Walsh (which is Irish for those fellas from Wales) is an intellectual white-collar bad boy and self-made man, whose mother was an abusive drug addict.
Just to stir the pot, in Omens, Kelley throws in two other potential mates for Olivia. Young Ricky Gallagher, heir to the Satan’s Saints motorcycle gang, and James Morgan. James is a man of Olivia’s class, a politician who has her life as a senate wife all mapped out. Fortunately, she’s far too edgy for that life and knows it. She’s more interested in the blond, leathered biker.
Omens is tame. In Visions, Olivia takes a ride on Ricky’s motorcycle and … Well, it’s “grass, gas, or ass.” The sex scenes are inventive. When I met Kelley Armstrong, I thought, “Wow. She wrote those sex scenes!” Then I look at myself and wonder how many people think the same thing about me. Sex is an expectation of the Urban Fantasy genre and Kelley writes it well. Very well.
I liked the story in Book 2 (Visions) but I’ll be honest. I skimmed the descriptions of Olivia’s visions. Not because the writing was bad. It’s not. Kelley Armstrong is a fantastic writer. But the visions are so horrific and vivid—reminiscent of Stephen King—I didn’t want them in my head, especially at bedtime.
In Book 3 (Deceptions) the story deepens as the old Welsh rivalry between raven-haired Gwynn ap Nudd and the golden boy Arawn is revealed. They both love Mathilda. But who will she choose? This question forms one of the major series questions. Arawn is Ricky Gallagher, thundering the highways on his motorcycle rather than through the fields on his horse. Still he’s on the hunt. Naturally, Gabriel is Gwynn—dark, mysterious, grave. Both are willing to do anything for Mathilda, our Olivia. The author clearly explains that these characters are not reincarnations. They do not follow a fated pattern, and they have free will.
SPOILER: In the myth, Mathilda chooses Gwynn and the couple betray Arawn. But not so here. In Visions, Olivia chooses Ricky Gallagher and by Deceptions, she is officially his girlfriend, having been to the clubhouse and been somewhat accepted by Ricky’s father. Still, she has moments where she dreams of being with Gabriel. Ah, the old love triangle arises.
A second major story question revolves around Olivia’s birth parents: Todd and Pamela Larsen. Did they really ritually kill four couples, and if so, why? In Omens, Gabriel and Olivia solve one of the crimes. So that leaves six murders still unaccounted for. In Deceptions, we discover more about Todd and Pamela, possible motives, triggers, and liaisons, and a new story emerges about Eden Larsen AKA Olivia Taylor-Jones.
This series is addictive because of all the unanswered questions. Kelley Armstrong is clever with the cliffhangers and even more clever at weaving action and emotion.
The fourth book is Betrayals. This one really stopped me in my tracks. More horrific visions involving the savage murder of young fae girls. I couldn’t handle it. I wanted to read every word but I just couldn’t do it. I’m very visual and I found it too graphic. I ended up skimming most of this book because I just wanted to know who Olivia chose … Ricky or Gabriel? Because by then I’d decided who I wanted her to choose. It’s a hard choice for the reader. Ricky and Gabriel are two very different men from two very different worlds, but both are handsome knights who’d give their life for their beloved.
I read every word of Book 5 (Rituals). Kelley does an amazing job of tying everything up in this, the final book. The addition of the third fey strain—the horrid unforgiveable Sluagh, who steal souls and turn them into blood-crazed birds—really ups the stakes.
Was I satisfied with the ending? Yes. Was everything explained? Yes. This is an epic series: part horror, part romance, and all thriller. I hope it gets optioned for the screen.
Do you ever wonder how many writers are in your community?
This is a perfect way to find out. Join us in celebrating the new White Pines Collection.
I will be reading a brief, family-safe scene from To Render a Raven (I know they’re hard to find in my books.) Books will be available to borrow!
I love that the library is supporting local authors. Come and celebrate along with us. Please let me know if you can come or RSVP with the library.
