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Pluto Rising: A Katy Klein Mystery

by Karen Irving

Speak Ill of the Dead: A Camilla Macphee Mystery

by Mary Jane Maffini

Ruby Ruby: A Murder Mystery

by Bradley Harris

After almost two decades of stellar and world-class Canadian crime fiction from writers such as Gail Bowen, Howard Engel, Peter Robinson, Ted Wood, and the two Wrights (Eric and L.R.), there is no phalanx of promising mystery writers settling into place as obvious successors. The past few years have been bereft of clearly top-class talent, and if three recent first mystery novels are any indication, the future of Canadian crime writing is one of competent blandness rather than edge-of-the-seat excitement. Each of these first-time authors has stuck resolutely to the traditional genre formula and none has broken exciting new ground.

One thing is clear, though, there’s a minor mystery-writing renaissance occurring in the national’s capital, where two female residents have produced novels with eerie similarities. Both Pluto Rising and Speak Ill of the Dead feature an Ottawa-based, slightly ditzy single female forced into reluctant detection to counter an unsympathetic police department. Each woman operates on her own a business teetering on the edge of success; neither has completely abandoned romantic hopes; both are smart, competent 1990s women labouring under the weight of their parental families; and each has a propensity to take whimsically dangerous (and often stupid) actions that undermine her credibility.

Karen Irving, who has worked as a social worker and counsellor, uses both her vocation and avocation to good effect in Pluto Rising, which features a 40-something ex-social worker turned consulting astrologer, Katy Klein, and her computer-obsessed teenaged daughter. When a new male client wants astrological help sorting out his jumbled childhood memories, Klein is uneasy with both the ramifications of the question and the motives of the questioner. She and her family are drawn reluctantly into a conspiracy and cover-up that goes back decades and involves some influential figures in politics and the medical establishment. When Klein’s client is killed, her search for the murderer leads to some computer hackers, a brush with Ottawa’s shadowy security services, and an expedition to Montreal for historical hospital records. Each step also brings her inexorably closer to personal danger. The story is garnished with a few interesting characters (including a psychiatrist with the apparent ability to abandon practice and patients at a moment’s notice) and glimpses of the protagonist’s family and social life, but the plot is too well telegraphed and inevitable to be challenging.

Speak Ill of the Dead has victims’ rights advocate Camilla MacPhee investigating the murder of a vindictive fashion columnist. MacPhee’s best friend discovered the body, and when the police suspect the friend is also the killer, Camilla charges to the rescue. While the story contains a cogent mystery, a plausible solution, and a delightfully loathsome sidekick, these bright spots are lost in a swirl of overabundant suspects, breathless prose, lovesick secondary characters, and a torrent of eventually irritating flip comments and asides. This is a watered-down derivative of Sparkle Hayter, and the relentlessly upbeat snappy tone eventually becomes wearisome. Mary Jane Maffini, a self-styled lapsed librarian and mystery bookstore owner, has tried to pack too much into her first novel.

The appeal of the three-day novel-writing competition has always been a mystery to me, and I had imagined that the final result of trying to write a novel over a long weekend would be a somewhat chaotic manuscript. In my naiveté, I assumed that when the winning book was eventually published it would be cleaned up and possibly fleshed out.

Alas, Ruby Ruby appears to have enjoyed none of these treatments, and the result is a disappointing novella-length text aspiring to novelty and novelhood. The writing style of this somewhat choppy tale often becomes opaque, the text is interrupted with inserts about the Canadian North, Memphis street layouts, and the overall appeal of the South, and the plot and character development vary between skimpy and none.

At less than half the length of a formula trade detective novel, Ruby Ruby, the tale of a Canadian ex-soldier working for a Memphis security company, gets off to a promising start with the murder of a guard in an abandoned factory site. But it tails away through a dispiriting mix of death, wounding, and reminiscence to a sudden and unsatisfactory conclusion. (Perhaps time ran out?)

Author Bradley Harris, an expatriate Canadian working in Tennessee, is the author of several plays, some short stories, and three novels in the Jack Minyard series.

These three books left me with the clear feeling that the first effort of a promising mystery talent was conspicuously absent and that none of them is likely to have readers turning pages late into the night or beating paths to bookstores for sequels. Somewhere a new major talent must be working away to achieve publication – I’ll just have to keep reading and hoping.

 

Reviewer: John North

Publisher: Polestar Book Publishers

DETAILS

Price: $9.95

Page Count: 336 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-896095-95-X

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 1999-11

Categories: Fiction: Novels

Reviewer: John North

Publisher: RendezVous Press

DETAILS

Price: $11.95

Page Count: 304 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-929141-65-2

Released: Aug.

Issue Date: November 1, 1999

Categories: Fiction: Novels

Reviewer: John North

Publisher: Anvil Press

DETAILS

Price: $12.95

Page Count: 124 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-895636-23-X

Released: Aug.

Issue Date: November 1, 1999

Categories: Fiction: Novels