I’m not quite sure how to talk about this one! I had never heard of it before I went searching for a book to fill this specific Read Harder challenge (⇣), and I’d never heard of the author, either. I don’t think it’s because she was Canadian, I think it’s because she was popular in the 80s and early 90s, and then she and her books faded into the place where books go when they aren’t popular anymore and haven’t been inducted into “the canon”. (In this case I’m using “the canon” as a way to refer to books the general public has chosen to keep in the zeitgeist as worthy of remembrance and not the way the crusty old white men do at universities to refer to books they think are worthy of study, and fuck all those other books.)
This isn’t a traditional mystery—we know from page one who the murderer is. The conflict here is finding out why George Wilcox has murdered a man he’s known for decades, and watching Karl Alberg track him down. The book feels very grounded and person, almost like a character study, and the police work didn’t feel flashy like a lot of it does in mystery novels nowadays. George’s story is a fascinating one, and and Karl is an interesting main character to follow. We also get POV from Cassandra Mitchell, a librarian in the small Sunshine Coast town they all live in, in British Columbia. Cassandra has ties to both George and Karl, so it was interesting seeing how everybody’s loyalties played out over the course of the story. I also liked going back in time to the year I was born and seeing what life was like back then. Of course, that also has its downsides.
Which brings me to my only complaint, and that’s the blatant homophobic slur used by one of the secondary characters. I should have expected something like this, but I didn’t because I was all caught up in the nostalgia of it. And because I wasn’t, it really threw me off and soured the book for me. I had to put it down for a while. It was made worse by Karl being present when the character uses the slur, and Karl doesn’t in any way show he’s disapproving of it. Also, it came completely out of nowhere! There weren’t even any gay characters in this story, so she just decided to insert it in there for, what, “color”? It was a small moment, but it really did not go over well. This is especially aggravating because I was having such a good time with the book otherwise.
[3.75 stars, rounded up]
Read Harder Challenge 2022: Read an award-winning book from the year you were born. (It won the Edgar.)