SUSPENSE: Colonial murder mystery a doozy

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/09/2015 (3996 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Young English lawyer/naturalist Chad Hobbes sails for five months to the distant colony of 1869 Victoria, where the only work he can get is as a copper.

It’s a sprawling mudhole of competing and conniving hierarchies of British, Americans, expansionist Canadians, Chinese and even more-diverse indigenous people. There are lots of recognizable historical figures and familiar streets.

In Sean Haldane’s terrific The Devil’s Making (Minotaur Books, 368 pages, $25), a weird American doctor gets butchered, and all evidence points to a native chief as the murderer — but Hobbes, it goes without saying, has his doubts. This is neuropsychologist Haldane’s first novel, and it’s a doozy.

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It’s flashback time to early cases of ultra-morose loner Icelandic cop Erlendur Sveinnson in Arnaldur Indridason’s Oblivion (Seeker Books, 345 pages, $28).

It’s 1980, and a young Icelander found murdered in a lava-fed hot spring may have been killed on the nearby massive U.S. military base. But is it more sinister than black-market smuggling gone wrong?

Meanwhile, compelled by his brother’s disappearance in a blizzard when they were children, Erlendur embarks obsessively on yet another missing-person cold case — a teenage girl who left for school, never to be seen again.

A better-than-average chapter in the above-average series.

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A psycho is terrorizing Northern California by manipulating crises at crowded places to send people into deadly panic.

State cop Kathryn Dance’s sleuthing thing in Jeffrey Deaver’s Solitude Creek (Grand Central, 464 pages, $28) is reading body language fluently, and the villain soon makes her interest in him personal — even if he never says, “Hello, Clarisse,” you get his drift.

Meanwhile, gangbangers are running heavy weapons into Mexico, Dance has a complicated love life and even more complicated kids, and there seem to be as many law enforcement agencies in internecine power duels as there are suspects.

Deaver has a few too many “gotcha!” moments with readers, but still, a very decent read.

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Two people with a mysterious lack-of-a-past get murdered in their rural Quebec farmhouse during a snowstorm — the same storm-killing modus operandi as a series of murders in the United States.

The FBI somehow decides retired Montreal cop Emile Cinq-Mars is the ideal investigator; he’s soon sleuthing around New Orleans’ French Quarter as bodies pile up and the law enforcement agencies in both countries trip over each other. It will, of course, resolve back in the snows of Quebec.

John Farrow’s The Storm Murders (Minotaur Books, 312 pages, $30) is a ripping good read, though the explanation from the villain, when it finally comes, is really, really complex — to quote Eli Wallach, when you have the drop on someone, “Don’t talk. Shoot.”

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Stop us if you’ve heard this one before — in Jo Nesbo’s Blood on Snow (Knopf, 224 pages, $23), a hit man falls in love with his intended target.

Nesbo usually writes grim mysteries featuring messed-up Norwegian cop Harry Hole, but here’s a stand-alone in which Oslo’s top hit man gets an assignment from his heroin kingpin boss to murder the gangster’s wife. You’ll never guess what happens next.

It’s all about bad things happening to awful people.

 

Const. Chad Hobbes would have been right at home in some of Free Press education reporter Nick Martin’s favourite 19th-century Victoria pubs.