Serial killers’ kids convene in dark psychological thriller

Guilt by association or inherited guilt are contentious issues, even if they are rarely openly stated. For Nicola Fischer and a small group of people attending a retreat in V.A. Vasquez’s debut novel The Death Row Club, being the son or daughter of a serial killer opens their lives to exploitation, distrust and loneliness that only people who have gone through the same kinds of experiences can really understand.

Vasquez was born and raised in New York, and is currently a teacher of English in Buffalo. She spent five years in Scotland teaching at the University of Glasgow.

Connections among retreat attendees begin on the plane when Nicola meets another member of the new club, Zach. She also hopes to renew her friendship with a second member of the group, Greer, the maker of a true-crime TV miniseries called To Catch a Killer, about Nicola’s investigation into several murders committed by someone the media has dubbed the Ellicott Creek Ripper. When the filmmaker identifies Nicola’s father as the guilty party, she is torn between the guilt of not discovering her father’s actions sooner and a sense of betrayal about the tone and content of Greer’s commentary on the case.

The question of how much the sons and daughters of the murderers knew about their parents’ crimes, and how much influence they had over what happens, runs throughout the book. Nicola believes that she influenced her father to stop killing for 20 years, but is still struggling with the question of whether she could have stopped him altogether. Similarly, the other members of the group consider their own influence over their parents’ actions and wonder if they could have ended the killings.

Socialite dying to die can’t find a killer

Agnes Maurer wants to die. And she wants someone to do that for her.

Agnes Lives!, the debut novel of screenwriter Hallie Elizabeth Newton — her first screenplay credit, At Any Price, screened at TIFF in 2013 — covers 24 hours in socialite Agnes’s life as she seeks someone to murder her.

Would it be her boss, editor of the anti-fashion magazine Whorl, where Agnes, a former model, is listed as “cultural council”? The editor has a very attractive knife Agnes thinks could do the job, but editor Justine does not use it. Agnes takes the knife, full of hope she will find someone else to use it.

Will that be Agnes’s famous writer-director boyfriend? No, it won’t. The murderer won’t be the gun dealer she finds on Craigslist, nor the operator of a gun club who insists Agnes watch a video on gun safety. Nor is it the old politician from a previous life, nor a security guard who watches Agnes pee in an alley, nor the apparent Chinatown thugs she tries to buy a gun from, nor is it the famous director, nor the avant-garde artist.

Minnesota paddler’s many adventures in Boundary Waters, Canadian Shield chronicled

Minnesotan Bob O’Hara was a young lad when he fell in love with camping and canoeing on the Boundary Waters that stretch from northern Minnesota to the Canadian Shield.

He first launched a canoe as a Boy Scout in the 1950s, and as of last summer you could still find him on the border lakes, his 67th consecutive year on the waterways that launched his 50-year odyssey of Far North expeditions. In Where the Green Light Shines, author Ryan Rodgers describes it as “an astonishing run, every year from the age of 18 to 84.”

As remarkable as that seems, it is the five decades O’Hara spent paddling through northern Canada — mostly as a leader, dealing with often horrendous weather, one set of rapids after another, food shortages and a myriad of other concerns while living in the exhilaration of discovery and of communing with nature — that tell the real story of a life lived large, outside the constraints of everyday urban existence.

Not that O’Hara didn’t have to work for a living and to finance his adventures. He began a teaching job in 1963 and started what he’d continue throughout his career: taking students canoeing and camping in the Boundary Waters. During the first five years of the job, he taught for 180 days and camped for 125.

Cusk’s brief new novel skirts conventional storytelling in musings on celebrity, authenticity

Can a novel hold up without a conventional reliance on plot and characterization? Do abstract observations and commentary offer enough intrigue to replace concrete storytelling? These are questions readers may ask while turning the pages of Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, Life of M.

Cusk, who is a Canadian-born author living in the U.K. and best known for the Outline trilogy, is back with an idiosyncratic, slim novel. In it, we meet a mega-celebrity who bears an uncanny resemblance to Natalie Portman. The celebrity, known only as M, allows an unnamed author, whose gender and other defining characteristics are withheld, to follow her around to gain insight for an autobiography.

The actions of M are observed from an impassioned distance, and the author in the book relies mainly on on-screen performances and a public persona to create the contents of the autobiography. Themes of life imitating art and art imitating life are dramatized in ways that illustrate how stardom can obfuscate a person’s true self while diminishing their capacity for emotional connection.

“Acting involved pretending to be other people, whose own emotional states — such as (M) understood them — could preoccupy her for a time. Once they were completed, she was as locked out of these recordings as the millions of other eyes that watched them,” Cusk writes.

Former MLA details early years, struggles with alcohol and his path forward in earnest new memoir

Kevin Chief, the former two-time MLA for Point Douglas, is very unusual for a politician. In casual conversations with Manitobans of various voting flavours over the past decade and change, this reviewer can’t recall one single person ever saying they didn’t like the guy. On two occasions, acquaintances mused that they would cross party lines (in opposite directions) to vote for Chief if he ever ran for office in their riding.

Granting that these observations are anecdotal, how does one account for such broad appeal?

It’s not charisma so much as sincerity. When Chief speaks about his experiences and his hopes for the world (and, as a public speaker and presenter, he has given a lot of speeches both in and out of office), it comes across as both heartfelt and thoroughly ruminated upon. The same is true, as it turns out, in his new book.

With a Name Like Chief, co-written with Stu Slayen, is not a political memoir. While Chief’s political career did the most to put him in the public eye, the five years he spent in the Manitoba legislature starting in 2011 make up only a small percentage of his life, and receive a commensurate page count. Instead, two of the major throughlines of the book are the intertwined roles of alcohol and Canada’s horrific colonization project, and how they impacted his life experiences.

On the night table: Ryan Boldt

Ryan Boldt

Singer/guitarist, The Deep Dark Woods

What I’m reading right now is a very depressing novel called Babi Yar, by A. (Anatoly) Kuznetzov, the story of the massacre in Ukraine in 1941, when the Germans came into what was then the Soviet Union. It’s really good, but very insane.

I read a lot of classics. I just finished Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. The dialogue is a little weird, but then it gets so good. The ending is just … wow. I read a lot of history, or historical novels — war novels, that sort of thing. Lots of travel writing, too. Eric Newby was a travel writer from the 1940s and ’50s; I’ve been reading a lot of his stuff. He did books on climbing the mountains of Afghanistan, he fought in the war for the British in Italy … His books are amazing. Or people like Bill Bryson, I love all that stuff — every now and then I have to go away from the war stuff to a funny book.

What's Up: Smiley Face, Shari Lapena book launch, Winnipeg Comedy Showcase, Ximbombo Dance Party, Mending with Tradition

Smiley FaceDave Barber Cinematheque, 100 Arthur St.Tonight, 7 p.m.; Saturday, 3 p.m.Admission $11.50When all is said and done, and her career on screen is assessed in full, Anna Faris might just be remembered as one of the definitive comic actors of the 2000s.

Aside from starring in the Scary Movie franchise, which has been spoofing prestige and shlock for a quarter of a century, Faris, who turns 50 in November, showed off her comic chops as ex-centrefold Shelley Darlingson in the underrated 2009 film The House Bunny, creating a character who has developed a cult following. On Mom, Faris and co-star Allison Janney balanced producer Chuck Lorre’s penchant for horny humour with genuinely touching performances dealing with thorny issues such as addiction.

All those versions of Faris meet in the centre in filmmaker Gregg Araki’s 2007 stoner comedy Smiley Face, which finds Jane (Faris) sidetracked from the most straightforward mission by cannabis consumption. The extended supporting cast — featuring John Krasinski, Jane Lynch, Marion Ross, Jim Rash and Emmy winner Roscoe Lee Browne in his final role — is loads of fun, with Faris using each scene partner as a funhouse mirror to reflect her ascent into chaotic highness.

Faris, who stars in the current buddy comedy Spa Weekend, will return to more prestigious territory this fall in Primetime, director Lance Oppenheim’s dramatization of the rise of To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen; Faris plays Mary Joan Hansen, the wife of Hansen, played by Robert Pattinson.

Summer Reading Challenge concludes with more musings from young readers

Another Free Press Summer Reading Challenge for Kids is in the books, but before we turn the page completely, there are a few more reviews written by our young readers to share.

Participating readers were tasked to write down their thoughts about any of the books on the Summer Reading Challenge’s three reading lists; with a range of formats (novels, graphic novels, books with pictures), themes and reading levels to choose from, budding reviewers of all ages were eager to share their opinion.

Those registered for the challenge received reading resources and activities throughout the summer, from word searches or puzzles based on the content of the books to a set of discussion questions and, in one instance, a special video from an author.

There were also more creative activities meant to engage readers’ critical thinking skills, all of which were free to access for anyone who signed up for the challenge.

Catch the Devil follows serial con man preying on victims along the Gulf Coast — then repatedly duping law enforcement

The debut book from Pamela Colloff, a Texas-based investigative reporter for ProPublica and staff writer for the New York Times Magazine, complicates romantic notions of the scam artist and invites readers to reflect on the systems that enable them.

In Fabulous Bodies, body-snatcher’s snafu leads to rollicking gore-fest

What if you got the chance to meet your hero? The one catch: they’re dead (sort of), and you’ll have to steal their body and embark on a grim road trip of blood-soaked destruction.

Details bog down dystopian door-stopper The Breakup

Veteran U.S. author and journalist Kurt Andersen throws everything but the kitchen sink into this doorstopper of a novel set in a 21st-century America ripped apart by civil war.

Narrator reflects on severing ties with parents in sparse, striking prose

Italian author Andrea Bajani explores themes of trauma, erasure, control and family. He is the current international writer-in-residence at Rice University. The Anniversary is his fourth novel.