A fine eye for detail, the thrill of the plot

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Bowen has bravely chosen to let her protagonist age. (POSTMEDIA)

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The Nesting Dolls

By Gail Bowen

McClelland & Stewart, 332 pages, $30

When Regina mystery writer Gail Bowen introduced us to her sharp, multi-tasking sleuth Joanne Kilbourn 20 years ago, women crime solvers were a rare cultural commodity. Now they're now advancing in every media from every corner of the earth.

Turn on the tube and watch the abundance unfold: American Sue Thomas competes for viewers with Jane Tennison in London's Scotland Yard and private investigator Precious Ramatswe in Botswana.

Go to the movies: the comic parodies of hapless female detectives are gone, replaced by the likes of Gothic computer hacker Lisbeth Salander in Stockholm, the dark star of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy.

Competition rages for the readers of mystery fiction as well. On the nightstand and at the cottage, the old favourites persist: the savvy Californian Kinsey Milhone, the cynical V.I Warshawski in Chicago and the genteel Englishwoman Miss Jane Marple.

So where does Joanne Kilbourn, the well-to-do, somewhat conservative, politically correct academic from unglamorous Saskatchewan fit in? Can she compete? Does she deserve a place at the top of the pile, or at least near it?

She does indeed, even though she is no longer the bold young sleuth she once was. Fortunately, she is more.

Ours is often described as a shallow, youth-obsessed society, but in a contrarian gamble, Bowen has chosen to allow her protagonist to age. Fellow crime writer Ruth Rendell told Bowen publicly that she'd regret that choice. Rendell, it seems, was wrong.

In the first novel, 1990's Deadly Appearances, Kilbourn was a 43-year-old widowed mother, leading a life defined by struggle -- financial, emotional and professional. She's now pushing 60, professionally established and happily married to Zack Shreve, a prominent trial lawyer, who is also paraplegic.

Kilbourn's mysteries frequently evolved from her interesting professional life, which has also changed over the years from political strategist, to journalist and, most recently, university professor.

Although her insecurities, her loneliness and self-doubt are behind her, her newfound comfort and privilege have not blurred the qualities she needs to spot a crime and pursue it: curiosity, compassion and moral courage.

And Kilbourn needs them in spades to put the pieces of this latest puzzle together. The pleasures of an approaching family Christmas are suddenly lost as a young mother appears out of nowhere, hands her infant over to a family close to the Shreves, and disappears.

The desperate young mother will prove to be the secret daughter of Zack's brilliant and driven legal partner, Delia Wainberg, and the infant is her grandson.

Just as suddenly, the child's mother is found raped and strangled in her car in a bleak and frozen parking lot. In the midst of grief and confusion, the dead woman's lesbian partner appears, demanding custody of the child.

The plot leads us to (possibly) the least likely killer in all of the Kilbourn novels -- this is the 12th -- but Bowen's steady, unsensational hand slowly reveals him as breathtakingly plausible.

As always, Bowen's fine eye for detail makes for a rich and entertaining read entirely apart the thrill of the plot. Here she offers a portrait of Zack and Joanne as passionate and tender middle-aged married lovers whose intimacy and mutual trust are overshadowed by the fragility of Zack's realistically depicted paraplegia.

The first six Kilbourn novels have been developed as successful made-for-TV movies, starring Wendy Crewson. The Nesting Dolls is a fine book and a great candidate for another film.

Lesley Hughes is a Winnipeg writer and broadcaster.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 14, 2010 H9