Dead body discovered in dinosaur country

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/04/2021 (2024 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Traumatized foreign aid worker Amanda Doucette and her Mountie life partner Chris Tymko stumble into the discovery of a buried corpse in a remote part of Drumheller dinosaur country — could the death possibly be suspicious? In a murder mystery? Hmmm…

Pretty soon there is a long-lost unknown uncle — the aforesaid corpse? — powerful but dysfunctional fossil fuel families, unclear begatting, mysterious cowpersons in white pickups… and (horrors!) attacks on newspaper reporters.

Author Barbara Fradkin weaves a crackerjack story immersed in subtle Canadian history lessons in The Ancient Dead (Dundurn, 328 pages, $20) while reminding us that even one possible murder decades ago can destroy so many lives.

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A carnivore blogger and online video star disappears from her overnight shift at a pig abattoir in the U.K.’s Peaks District, the apparent victim of vengeful vegans who fed her to the pigs — goodness, that’s dastardly, allegedly, and we haven’t even heard yet about the ghost whose gaze brings imminent death.

All this is before it gets really complicated for D.I. Meg Dalton, acerbic, self-deprecating, slovenly, beset with issues — and bloody brilliant, isn’t she?

Roz Watkins’ Cut to the Bone (HQ, 408 pages, $32) is the third in the series of the eminently likable Dalton’s terrific adventures, though the outcome does ask us to set aside credulity just a tad far. Any pig puns would be wildly inappropriate.

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Suffering PTSD from a war-zone tragedy, star reporter Whit McKenna starts over on a small paper in a sleepy small Oregon city, where movie stars and other one-percenters could never possibly in a million years get bizarrely murdered — good heavens, no way, nor would they ever grow really icky tumours. Sure.

McKenna and her BFF, medical examiner/detective Katie Riggs, quickly learn they’re living in A Desperate Place (Crooked Lane Books, 311 pages, $36).

First-time author Jennifer Greer doesn’t stop for breath in a nifty debut that makes a great case for growing old gracefully.

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Former special forces private eye Nick Heller takes on Big Pharma after a buddy who saved his life in Afghanistan dies from an opioid overdose — a patriarchal family knew its magic pain pills were deadly addictive, and have killed to keep an Estonian clinical trial secret.

But finding the proof, that’s the key in Joseph Finder’s House on Fire (Dutton, 388 pages, $37) as various thugs, gold-digging would-be heirs, red herring wacko moustache-twirling siblings and suspects galore try to — spoiler alert — thwart his investigation.

The plot never pauses to test for logic, but it’s a darned good read — like Hercule Poirot tossed in a blender with Sam Spade and given access to the best computer hackers fiction can conjure up.

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Legendary Ottawa detective Kevin Beldon un-retires to hunt a killer dispatched by his arch-nemesis from the terrorist haven of Haiti — the villain is using a mind-controlled energy beam to kill the families of abortion providers at population-control corporate clinics (pause for breath).

Gerald Lynch’s The Dying Detective (Signature Editions, 349 pages, $20) is set in a dystopian world a few decades hence of risen seas, scarce water, white supremacist concentration camps, religious fanatics, ominously self-aware AI and memories that can’t be trusted.

The Dying Detective relies way too much on backstories of previous novels, but is a weird and compelling police procedural that believes it is saying something profound about death and identity — to those who can keep up with the author.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin always appreciates a soft pitch right down the middle, but dinosaurs and Alberta are just too easy.