A layered portrait of a changing city in the guise of a gripping crime novel, for fans of Tana French and Dennis Lehane.
The murder of two teenage girls in Toronto becomes an obsession for both a troubled city and a hard-boiled (but gourmet) detective.
Following an award-winning memoir, fiction for adults and children, a two-volume history of Canada, and 12 Canadian National Magazine Awards, Gillmor shows he has yet another trick up his sleeve. His first crime novel is narrated by police detective Jamieson Abel, a white law school dropout who gets along with exactly nobody on the corrupt Toronto force and is constantly in danger of getting canned before he can make it to retirement. He’s recently been partnered with Davis, a smart, well-spoken Black woman who’s the department’s only claim to diversity and its frequent media representative. As the novel opens, two high school track stars have been brutally murdered in St. James Town, a decaying high-rise community at the heart of multicultural Toronto: "The languages spoken in St. James Town in descending order of percentage are: English, Tagalog, Tamil, Unspecified Chinese, Mandarin, Korean, Spanish, Russian, Serbian, Bengali, Urdu, French, and Other." Under tremendous pressure from the mayor and media to solve this crime, Abel and Davis embark on a wild goose chase to locate the single, rather shaky suspect, a boyfriend of one of the girls. Meanwhile, mayhem in the area is on the rise: a sex worker is killed, one of the towers is burned to the ground, a local thug is the target of a jailhouse hit, large-scale new graffiti is going up nightly. Abel’s instincts tell him that somehow, everything is connected—and real estate values have something to do with it. As he obsessively tracks down leads, he sustains himself with martinis, espresso, and delicious meals for one. Food-loving readers may find themselves trying to replicate his sheet-pan salmon and a salad for which he “tossed together black beans, Kalamata olives, a sharp cheddar that had been aged for eight years, red pepper, and arugula, then made a dressing with olive oil, lime, jalapeños, and cumin.” Gillmor really knows his stuff—in a dazzling range of areas.
A layered portrait of a changing city in the guise of a gripping crime novel, for fans of Tana French and Dennis Lehane.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781771966900
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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