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: April 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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