With the exception of Kondor (his one attempt at a standard international-espionage thriller) Gregory Ward’s suspense fiction always offers readers a feast of seriously flawed characters doing evil to each other in the confines of southern Ontario. The Internet Bride lives up to expectations, as Inna Netrova hatches a plan to kill the aging Toronto software tycoon who plucked her from her homeland via a Russian matrimonial web site because of her resemblance to his dead wife.

Unfortunately, Inna’s plan depends on her lover Sergei, a fragile and drug-dependent reed of a man, and the assistance of a Leningrad mafiosa and an expatriate Russian mobster. Norbert Symes, the targeted tycoon, has the advantage of knowing about the planned putsch, but nothing of the plans of a realtor from the small Ontario town of Port Hope who has transferred his adulterous lust from Symes’s first wife to his Russian import. As this cast of diverse characters pursues unrelated but interactive agendas, deceptions and duplicities abound, intersect, and inevitably conflict.

Ward once again proves his mastery of creative genre-bending as the story wanders back and forth from suspense thriller to cautionary morality tale. This tragi-comic tale, with its comprehensive and woeful catalogue of human failings and abundance of thwarted plans, should probably be kept out of the hands of those easily distressed by human sin, or those seeking proof that nothing good will ever come from the World Wide Web.