This is the tenth cozy mystery featuring Cait Morgan, a fifty-ish, marmite-munching, tea-drinking, Welsh-Canadian sleuth who works as a criminal psychologist at a B.C. university on a mountain I’m sure I attended. I recognize those inlet views. In fact, Ace’s dashes of local colour really pulled me into this book.
After travelling the world for nine books solving light, cozy international murders (yes, no slash and gore is possible) Cait and her ex-RCMP/Intelligence officer husband, Bud, become embroiled in a possible murder right next door to their home on Red Water Mountain. Their ninety-year-old neighbour, Gordy Krantz, is discovered dead. He’s recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and suicide seems plausible until the coroner’s report comes back and they discover that old Gordy had been dosed with hemlock.
In between bouts of cooking, cuddling her Labrador retriever, and watching Scandi-noir (who doesn’t love Scandi-noir?), Cait investigates with the guile of Agatha Christie by pretending she’s collecting information for the eulogy Gordy directed her to write in his will. An eccentric cast of locals, one of whom is a garden centre mogul, rounds out the suspect list.
Early on, Cait and her faithful husband Bud (I still don’t know who’s more faithful, Bud or the dog?) acquire a disgusting mattress full of Gordy’s journals and using her eidetic memory, Cait is able to sort and file his life story from 1954 to 1993 all in her mind. After conducting her polite investigations, Cait laments: “This isn’t a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, as Churchill spoke of Russia; this is a maze of bricks walls, all ten feet high, with no apparent way out.” But get out she does. Cait Morgan is an impressive woman, as is Cathy Ace.
Ace has been shortlisted for the Bony Blithe Award the last three out of four years and won in 2015 for Best Canadian Light Mystery. Her writing is stellar. Details, references, allusions, expertly crafted phrasing, and serious subjects punctuated by wit and humour. Her references to local settings intrigue me. I deduced that the elusive Red Water Mountain must be on the north side of Lougheed Highway just west of Mission and craned my neck when I drove through the other day hoping I would see it and know. Before immigrating to Canada, Ace was a marketing specialist, speaker, and trainer. I’ve seen her present and she’s as lively and entertaining as her books. The Cait Morgan Mysteries have been optioned by the UK company Free@LastTV who produced MC Beaton’s Agatha Raisin books for TV.
Living in a rural community everyone knows their neighbours. Or do they? Is the eccentric single man you move in beside really the man he says he is? Or could he be a killer? A thief? An imposter? Is the woman offering you tea trying to get to know you or investigating you? How many bodies are buried outside your door?
The Corpse with the Iron Will is published by Four Tails Publishing.
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 had the pleasure of meeting Kelley Armstrong last weekend at Creative Ink. She is one of the most talented and generous writers I’ve met yet. I learned so much in her three-hour master class that I’m still considering. The discussion there actually prompted a complete revision of the next book I’m writing. In a good way. I also went to a panel she joined on “Elevator Pitches” — sell your book in the time it takes to travel between floors. I wrote one for the book I’m currently working on and pitched it to her when we met for our “blue pencil” appointment. She took out one word and liked the rest. When she read the first scene of my draft, she gave me nothing but positive comments and solid suggestions for how to improve. This is what a writer needs.
I started reading her “Cainsville” series two weeks ago and am surprised by similarities between it and my Hollystone mysteries series. Both are urban fantasy. Both are murder mystery. Both are written for adults—she writes some seriously edgy scenes! Both feature faeries and Celtic myth. I started with Book Two, so now I must go back and read Book One. They’re written as stand-alone novels, so I had no problem following along. I’m just hooked now and want to know more. I want to see how the characters progress from beginning to end.
My review of Kelley’s latest Rockton book appeared last week in the Ottawa Review of Books. You can click the link or read it here.
Who is The Watcher in the Woods?
Book Four in Kelley Armstrong’s Casey Duncan crime series follows fresh on the heels of Book Three; in fact, it’s so fresh the bodies are still decomposing in the woods. Without divulging too many spoilers, one of the men who pursued the serial killer in the last story is shot in the back. A bullet is lodged near Kenny’s spine and there are no surgeons in Rockton—just a butcher who was once a psychiatrist.
Intent on saving Kenny’s life, Detective Casey Duncan and Sheriff Eric Dalton fly secretly to Vancouver to appeal to the best neurosurgeon they know: Casey’s older sister. They must sneak her into town for security reasons. Of course, in a town the size of Rockton, it’s hard to sneak anybody anywhere. The introduction of April as a major character opens up Casey’s family history and peels more layers from her backstory. But the sisters’ relationship is tenuous as April is about as gifted and gregarious as “House.”
Rockton is a town built on secrets. Imagine living in a place in the middle of the Yukon wilderness. A place that is not on a map or visible by plane or satellite or hooked up to the Internet. A place hidden from the world. Imagine that everyone who lives there, all two hundred of you, have been brought here for a reason. Refuge. You’re either a victim of crime or a criminal yourself. The butcher may have murdered his entire family. The madam who runs the bordello may have ripped off the elderly for their life savings. Your neighbour may have been a hit man for the mob. It’s an idyllic prison, of sorts. Even our fearless detective is hiding out for a reason: she is a killer. Not a “line of duty” kind of killer—a “woman who went looking for a man with a gun in her pocket” kind of killer.
Into that mix, throw a man who claims to be a U.S. Federal Marshal in search of a fugitive. Let him track down the hidden town, watch from the woods, then come in bold-faced and search among the townspeople for his target. Idealism turns to chaos. Everyone is certain the marshal is there to drag him or her back to face justice. The marshal claims the person he is seeking appears normal but is criminally insane—a description that fits several of Rockton’s residents. But he won’t reveal who he’s hunting. Now, what would happen if the marshal was found murdered? If indeed he is a marshal. How difficult would it be to determine who shot him?
With a police force of three, a volunteer militia, and an unreliable council who deals out its own brand of justice, anything can happen. In the previous book, the leader of the council was removed. I won’t tell you how that happened. But, the new leader is adversarial and just as sketchy as his predecessor.
The romantic sub-plot takes a back seat in this book. Now that Casey and Eric have settled into their relationship, Casey focuses on protecting her newly-adopted town from itself. She suspects everyone of murdering the U.S. Marshal, except her boyfriend. Even her estranged sister, who appeared in Rockton at the same time as the man, is suspect.
And then there are the hostiles—residents who’ve left Rockton to take up residence in the wilderness. Intriguing and terrifying, these shadow-creatures are something between reavers and zombies. With just a hint of humanity, they appear when least expected. In this book, Armstrong throws in a delicious twist that makes us wonder how they evolved—or rather devolved. Fodder for another sequel? Please.
Armstrong’s clean, tight, present-tense narration propels this crime thriller through rock-strewn paths to the big reveal. With a town like Rockton, and so much more to learn about Casey Duncan and her partner, Eric Dalton, this series could go on indefinitely.
I’ve been a Shetland fan for the last few years and have watched all three seasons on Netflix (multiple times) but I’d never read any of Ann Cleeves’ novels.
I chose Thin Air (which is book five in the Shetland series and not on Canadian Netflix) mainly because it was available at my library, and it was in paperback. I like paperbacks best. They are lighter to read in bed.
The woman’s writing blew me away. Reading Ann Cleeves is like being wrapped in a silky merino wool blanket. I can see why there is a cue of holds for her novels. I couldn’t wait to snuggle down in my bed every night and immerse my mind in her comforting prose by the light of my pink salt lamp. I don’t know exactly what it is about her style that affects me so much. Perhaps, it’s the detail.
I’m going to assume that, like me, Ann Cleeves is quite visual. She paints pictures so true-to-life, I feel like I can see what she is seeing in her mind, and what our hero, Jimmy Perez, is seeing in his. As a detective, Perez is a keen observer. He’s not romantic and flowery, (though he’s certainly charming and loveable) but he’s genuinely interested and his mind is always spinning around the murder case. In this passage, he goes to London to speak with the victim’s mother:
She led him into a wide hallway. The walls had been painted a deep green and there were pictures everywhere. The art was unfamiliar. Some looked like prints of cave paintings, scratched images of animals and birds. Primitive, but also amazingly lifelike. There were photos of strange dwellings growing out of hillsides, a collage made from scraps of woven cloth and two large abstract oils. He would have liked to spend more time with them, but she’d already moved on and had settled on the windowsill in a room that seemed half-sitting room and half-study. There was a desk and the walls were hidden by bookshelves. In one corner an armchair was covered with a batik throw and next to it stood a coffee table made from animal hide. There was a glass on the table and Perez thought that she’d been sitting here when he’d phoned the night before. Now she was framed by the window, so she looked like a piece of art herself. The background was a small courtyard garden, where the sun had been trapped by a brick wall. In the corner stood a tree covered in pink blooms in a pot.
Naturally there is a murder. Two, in fact. And a tie that binds the victims. There is also sea, shifting fog, ferries, and stone cottages. And most importantly, a legendary ghost. Peery Lizzie. A ten-year-old girl who got lost in the fog and drowned in the flooding tide in the 1920s. Was it murder or an accident? Was Peery Lizzie lured to her death? And how is she connected to our recent victims? However she succumbed, it is the ghost of Peery Lizzie who helps our detectives unravel the murder.
Because no one ever really disappears into thin air. Do they?
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