Mounties targeted in Manitoba mystery

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/11/2022 (1401 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An Interlake maniac is targeting Mounties on lonely frozen mud-, windrow- and-ice-encrusted roads as the sandbaggers race against the river backing up over the banks — what a conundrum for Sgt. Roxanne Calloway, who thought rural Manitoba was far more peaceful than evil Winnipeg.

Seems pretty much everyone is a suspect, and everyone has secrets, and every member of the RCMP is an imminent victim in a supposedly idyllic area where the entrenched locals warily watch every step that the interlopers from the city take.

Published in April, Down Came the Rain (Signature Editions, 256 pages, $18) is the third short but terrific murder mystery from Winnipeg author Raye Anderson, who transforms a thinly disguised Gimli into Canada’s murder capital.

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Australian writer-in-residence Winnifred bonds with three fascinating new chums in the Boston Public Library after they hear a woman scream while being murdered in another room — she immediately writes the three into her own novel while they all investigate the murder.

But Winnifred is actually the first-person narrator of a murder mystery being written by an author in Australia, and which is being critiqued chapter by chapter by an editor in Boston — who may be a real serial killer. Straightforward, simple, eh?

Published in paperback in June, Sulari Gentill’s The Woman in the Library (Sourcebooks, 288 pages, $25) is quite a clever little murder mystery, and perhaps a veiled warning for what can happen when an editor tries taking over the writing of a story.

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A woman in hiding who fears her sociopathic stalker will soon kill her leaves cryptic clues to his identity and to the secrets of his criminal empire, along with a plea to save her son — and is soon found murdered in a decrepit caravan park along the North Sea.

Will D.C.I. Kate Daniels and her wife, criminal profiler Jo Sousby, along with Tyneside’s brilliant murder squad, find the Moriarty-level killer before he finds the boy — or maybe kills the cops first?

Mari Hannah’s Her Last Request (Orion Fiction, 416 pages, $18) is a crackerjack of a murder mystery from one of the genre’s most underappreciated writers.

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A young woman obsessed with two men who only want her for one thing, and who has a bright academic future with her classic love tragedies thesis that Romeo/Aeneas/Tristan are self-centred jerks, jumps to her death from the fifth floor. Well, how often does a suicide on page 10 of a murder mystery remain a suicide by page 285?

Published in July 2021, Tess Gerritsen and Gary Braver’s Choose Me (Thomas & Mercer, 334 pages, $23) is a tangled web of professors and students acting badly.

Told from three characters’ perspectives, the tale has few likable characters — you’d like two women, a cop and a doctor, both brilliant, both betrayed — but it’s well-told and pulls off the whodunit, howdunit and whydunit really well.

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A madman loose in 1912 London’s dark and rainy streets is slaughtering seemingly unconnected Cambridge University grads — and (eww, gross) slicing off their index fingers.

Quite the sleuthing challenge for young lawyer Daniel Pitt, pioneering pathologist Dr. Miriam fford Croft — still too reticent to declare they’re mutually smitten, fie on her being 15 years older — and gentleman cop buddy Ian Frobisher.

In Three Debts Paid (Ballantine Books, 304 pages, $37), published in April, the prolific Anne Perry gives us a decent but quite short little mystery resolved way too tidily and padded out with repetitive dialogue.

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Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin keeps reading in murder mysteries that someone’s smile doesn’t reach their eyes — he’s signed up to take lessons.