Review: The Calling by Inger Ash Wolfe

Title: The Calling

Author: Inger Ash Wolfe

Publisher: Corgi [2008]

ISBN: 978-0-552-15685-1

Legnth: 512 pages

I bought the Calling a few months ago ago after reading an article about new Canadian crime fiction I should be looking out for. I rescued it from the ever-ready-to-topple Mount TBR at this particular moment due to Cathy’s passionate review last week. What annoys me is that it took me so long to read this wonderful book.

In the small fictional town of Port Dundas in rural Canada a loved elderly inhabitant invites a man into her home and he kills her. When her tortured body is discovered the Police are baffled as to who would commit such an act in a place where everyone knows everyone else.  When a second body, similarly mutilated, is discovered in an adjacent town the local Police think they may have stumbled onto a serial killer.

It’s the characters in this book that captured my heart. Hazel Micallef is the main protagonist and she’s not your run-of-the-mill investigator. She’s 61 and feels older than her 87 year old mother, is newly divorced, needs major back surgery and survives on pain-killers and whisky, is techno-phobic and deals with moronic bureaucrats for a living. Over the course of the book she does some silly things that if she were thinking more clearly she probably wouldn’t do, but haven’t we all cut off our own noses to spite our faces at one time or another? Her actions are very believable even though everyone knows, Hazel included, that there are smarter ways to deal with pen-pushers than taunting them.

The minor characters are well-fleshed out too. James Wingate, a new transfer from Toronto is quite a lovable if tetchy police officer and Hazel’s mother Emily and the French detective Sevigny are both a delight. We also spend a good deal of time with the perpetrator of the crimes and even some time with the victims and this adds an extra dimension The Calling. Normally in these kinds of books I find myself thinking about the victims ‘that’s all very well but no real people would actually fall for that ruse’ whereas here I could easily identify with the particular kind of promise offered by this killer and therefore had no trouble imagining him collecting his victims. Wolfe has depicted the small town life beautifully too and the location is almost another character in its own right. In that respect I found this book similar to another excellent Canadian tale I read earlier this year: Valley of the Lost by Vicki Delany.

The story certainly maintains interest with very little bloat in its 500+ pages and has several nicely unpredictable twists. There are bits of the plot that I found difficult to swallow though including some techno-babble of the kind that populates crime on TV (where a computer application manages to do things that stretch the bounds of credibility way beyond breaking point and all in the space of about the it takes real-world computers to turn on). Then there’s the fact that even when it’s understood there is serial killer on the loose, the case is still left in the hands of what is essentially a small outpost of a handful of officers. No matter how much the townsfolk and junior officers love Hazel I didn’t believe this for a nanosecond.

However, I fairly easily put that aside and still found the book an above average read with terrific characters and good story telling with a decidedly grizzly streak to keep the more blood thirsty readers happy.

My rating 4/5

Other stuff

Reviewed by Cathy at Kittling Books (thanks for prompting me to rescue it from the TBR pile) and Karen at Aust Crime Fiction.

Inger Ash Wolfe is a pseudonym for an apparently well known North American author. There has been much speculation on that continent about who has written anonymously as seen in this article in The Star. Sarah Weinman raised some interesting points and received this response from Inger Ash Wolfe which is quite fascinating. For the record I’ve no clue who it might be and am more curious about why they chose this route than who it is.

There is apparently going to be a second book in this series released soon. I shall look forward to reading it.

 

Review: Valley of the Lost by Vicky Delany

Title: Valley of the Lost

Author: Vicki Delany

Publisher:Blackstone Audiobooks [2009]

ISBN: n/a (digital download via audible.com)

Length: 9hours 34 minutes

Narrator: Carrington MacDuffie

In the small town of Trafalgar in the hinterland of British Columbia, Canada, ageing hippie Lucky Smith finds the body of a young woman in the woods near the women’s support centre where she works. Lying by the body is a crying baby boy. The police, including Lucky’s daughter Molly who is a probationary constable, soon realise that the dead woman has hidden her past well and they struggle to piece together what might have happened to the young mother. Some are quick to write the death off to the relapse of a heroin junkie but Sergeant John Winters wonders if there’s more to it. As the investigation proceeds Lucky looks after the baby, fighting off a determined social services officer in the process.

Although the mystery itself unfurls relatively slowly it doesn’t matter as there’s lots going on and I was quickly drawn into the world the author had created here. As is the way with small towns, many of the people know each other and the author does a great job of introducing the various characters and making the reader care about them by showing snippets of their day-to-day lives. Alongside the Smith family and the engaging lead investigator there are a host of other people who play roles that may not have anything to do with the mystery but are still people you want to know more about. If you’d suggested to me before I read this book that someone could make me even vaguely interested in a character who was an ex-super model I’d have laughed at you but Eliza, John Winters’ wife, is a delight as she wrestles with her own career crisis while supporting her husband in his demanding job.

The book is a combination whodunit and police procedural and offers the best of both. Winters doggedly interviews and re-interviews people who he thinks might know something about the dead girl’s past. In this way the various potential suspects are slowly fleshed-out and the pool narrowed down. The resolution is ultimately quite complex but credible within the context of the story and very easy to follow.

I’m also thrilled to point out that Delany has succeeded in incorporating the political/social commentary into the story via character traits or story threads as authors are supposed to do. Unlike this book and this one, both recent reads, I didn’t feel like I was being lectured to like a naughty (or stupid) schoolgirl and so was far more willing to contemplate the important themes being raised in the story.

This was a thoroughly entertaining book with a whole host of great characters and a multi-faceted plot and I’ll be looking for more books by Vicky Delany.

Audio-book specific comments: The narration is excellent with MacDuffie managing to make it clear which of the many characters is speaking with only minor differences in her tone or inflection. Normally I listen to audio books while doing something else but with this one I sat in my reading chair and listened to the last hour or so just to enjoy being read to.

My rating 4/5

Other stuff

Reviewed by Lesa at Lesa’s Book Critiques

Reviewed by Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise (whose review prompted me to seek this book out)

This is the second book in Delany’s series featuring John Winters and Molly Smith and she has also written some standalone novels. As well as having her own website Delany is one of the authors who publish the group blog Type M for Murder (one of the group blogs I didn’t feature in last Sunday’s post about this phenomenon)

 

Review: Dead Cold by Louise Penny

Title: Dead Cold (a.k.a A Fatal Grace in the US)

Author: Louise Penny

Publisher: Headline [2006]

ISBN: 978-0-7553-2893-2

In a small village about an hour and a half’s drive east of Montreal a woman who is universally despised is murdered while watching a curling match. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his colleagues from the Surete du Quebec descend on the village to determine who, among the many with strong motive, committed the crime. 

Dead Cold is the second book in a series featuring Armand Gamache. I knew very early on in my reading that it wasn’t the first book in the series because every three or four pages cryptic (and some not -so-cryptic) references are made to the events which clearly took place in a previous book. It should have come with a giant warning sticker that said do not read this until you have read Still Life. There were endless mentions of the fallout on Gamache from the previous case and a whole thread about one of the agents on Gamache’s team who had done something awful in the previous case but none of that made sense to me. I know there are no hard and fast rules about how authors of series should treat prior material but, in my opinion, the constant referrals in Dead Cold to prior events damaged the narrative of this story. I am quite sure that if I’d read the first book my experience of this one would have been entirely different and I don’t think that should ever be the case.

I’ll admit I not only struggled to put aside my annoyance at that but there were parts of the story that made little sense to me so I doubt the rest of my judgement is completely objective. However, I shall proceed. I wanted to like the book as it’s set in one of my favourite parts of the world (Quebec province of Canada) and I did find the setting quite lovely. The mixture of French and English language and culture seemed very natural and much as I remembered it and the depiction of life in a small, close-knit community was perfectly charming. I grew up in a country where it snows for a couple of months a year on the very top of a few large hills so my concept of winter was never particularly strong until I spent the season in Canada one year and Penny has also captured what I will always think of as real winter to perfection. 

Armand Gamache is in the tradition of Hercule Poirot and Inspector Morse: a genius in his field with almost supernatural abilities to solve crimes by the powers of his deductive reasoning. Unlike those predecessors he’s less arrogant about it, seems far more likable and has better relationships with those around him. I didn’t find him particularly realistic, perhaps uncharitably I never do believe that kind of character, but I did enjoy watching the puzzle unfold through his eyes. The rest of his team weren’t very memorable, they were too fawning in their adoration of Gamache for that, but some of the villagers (potential suspects all) were well created and interesting characters.

I’m not sure I can go back and start with the first book (as I know so much of the outcome now) but if you’re in the market for a solidly written traditional mystery you could do far worse than Louise Penny although I would strongly recommend you read Still Life before this book.

My rating 2.5/5 (heavily influenced by the ’seepage factor’ from the previous book)