MONTREAL NOIR

Name: MONTREAL NOIR
Author: John McFetridge
ISBN: 978-1-61775-345-9

edited by John McFetridge & Jacques Filippi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 2017

Whether it’s the quirkiness of the characters, the ingenuity of the puzzles, or the big hearts inside some of the darkest...

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“Montreal has always been a popular destination for Americans,” write McFetridge and Filippi, “though it’s definitely nothing like America.” These 15 new stories celebrate the differences between us and our northern neighbor.

As in any good noir, poverty, drugs, and despair cloud many of the characters’ lives. But even the stories about druggies have a certain je ne sais quoi. In Samuel Archibald’s “Three Tshakapesh Dreams,” the undercover cop trying to solve a heroin addict’s murder struggles with nighttime visions fueled by his grandfather’s battles with a black bear. And the homeless men in Michel Basilières’s “The Haunted Crack House” were once artists. Murderers also have their own cachet. Max, the hero of Howard Shrier’s “Milk Teeth,” searches for a young girl’s killer among the champions of professional wrestling. Danger lurks among aspiring writers in Johanne Seymour’s spooky “Journal of an Obsession.” And a celebrity harbors a secret in Geneviève Lefebvre’s “Such a Pretty Little Girl.” Homage is also paid to the old ways. Patrick Senécal’s “Rush Hour” features one of the last traffic reporters to assess the streets by car. And Hope Sze, the modern heroine of Melissa Yi’s “The Sin Eaters,” finds solace in a venerable Yiddish proverb. Even the stock characters of noirdom—mobsters and hit men—offer novel takes on crime in Peter Kirby’s “The Crap Magnet” and Robert Pobi’s “Poppa.”

Whether it’s the quirkiness of the characters, the ingenuity of the puzzles, or the big hearts inside some of the darkest villains, noir’s different north of the border. Here’s hoping readers will say “Vive la difference.”

Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-61775-345-9

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Akashic

Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | INTERNATIONAL CRIME

- BOOK REVIEW
LET IT RIDE
by John McFetridge

- BOOK REVIEW
EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE
by John McFetridge

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
TWO NIGHTS
by Kathy Reichs

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THE WINNER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997

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Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)