CRIME FICTION
Vancouver’s Wiebe made a name for himself with his Dave Wakeland hard-boiled crime thrillers; he actually gets better with each successive book. Case in point, his newest, which tells the interconnected stories of Cameron Shaw, newly paroled on a manslaughter conviction, and Meghan Quick, a cop and single mother investigating the death of a woman immolated in her own home. Shaw is barely back on the streets before he gets himself entangled with a gang known as the League of Nations. It’s a high-octane thriller that isn’t afraid to pummel its reader with the literary equivalent of the baseball bats the gang members use to dispose of their victims’ bodies.
British novelist Jackson, author of a bestselling YA trilogy, returns with a new thriller that covers some of the same ground, specifically the focus on true crime and its discontents. A crew of British filmmakers have descended on a New Hampshire town to shoot a documentary about the eponymous Rachel Price, a mother who vanished 16 years previously, apparently abandoning her two-year-old daughter, Annabel. Now 18, Bel is as astonished as anyone when her mother turns up out of the blue with a story about being held captive by an unknown man. Commentary on the nature of people’s fascination with true crime lends the book crossover potential, though this is ground that has been well trod already, not least by Jackson herself.
MacLachlan Gray is probably best known for his stage show “Billy Bishop Goes to War,” but he is also an accomplished crime novelist. His latest completes a loose trilogy of historical mysteries set in Vancouver (the Raincoast Noir series). The new book focuses on Ed McCurdy, a print journalist who has made the transition to radio, becoming known by his broadcast moniker, Mr. Good-Evening. McCurdy is one of several people caught up in the case of the socalled Fatal Flapper, a secretary accused of murdering her boss by stabbing him repeatedly with a stiletto shoe. As a homicide detective and a fraud investigator slowly become convinced the woman in custody may be innocent, they face bureaucratic jurisdictional obstacles. The real draw here is the setting: Prohibition-era Vancouver in the months leading up to the great U.S. stock market crash of 1929.
In “Point Zero,” first published in 1959 and newly translated into English by Louise Heal Kawai, Matsumoto examines the shadowy corners of postwar Japan, with a specific focus on pan-pan women, a loose group of prostitutes. Matsumoto is not a flashy writer and Kawai’s graceful translation is the epitome of a slow burn; “Point Zero” has much to say about Japanese culture and the ravages of war on a national psyche for readers patient enough to follow the author along the path of his deceptively quiet narrative.