Hamilton author’s knife-edge writing keeps the fear alive
Hamilton author David Neil Lee has written a probing story in Commander Zero about Joey, part of a tight-knit British Columbia coastal community of fishers and loggers.
He’s found in the water, near death and with no memory of his now-disappeared wife.
The community nurses him back to one type of health, but what he needs is help to return to a state he’d rather not remember.
He’s prepared to get on with his life, to climb out of his state one rung on the ladder at a time. But Joey suffers emotional paralysis whenever progress is offered — soul-eating fear that there’s something out there, just beyond his memory, out of reach, that he’s likely better off not discovering.
Knife-edge writing, excellent pacing, characters who sometimes talk just a touch too f ast. The short early chapters jerk the story forward, all in support of shaping Joey’s current states as a scattered jigsaw puzzle — with pieces missing.
Lee is a strong storyteller with powerful moments of insight and resolution.
Andrew Pyper’s The Demonologist is storytelling at its finest.
Prof. David Ulman is a world-class expert on demonic literature, a specialist in Milton’s Paradise Lost. He’s not a believer; to him, it’s just literature.
But he accepts a strange woman’s all-expense-paid invitation to Venice to witness a “phenomenon.” He takes his daughter with him, goes to the meeting and returns to find her on the hotel’s roof edge.
The pace heats up in the first chapter and stays to the climax. This is storytelling that transcends the boundaries of genre: mystery (a vanished child), thriller (evil), a page-turner. It’s beautifully written, with layer upon layer of fear, redemption and deep feelings rarely expressed in a fiction.
The Demonologist should not be missed.
This second novel in Cathy Ace’s Cait Morgan series is set in British Columbia: A weekend in wine country with progressive tastings, gourmet food and eccentric characters desperately trying to climb the boutique winery ladder regardless of the cost. The Corpse with the Golden Nose is neatly paced with zippy dialogue and plot twists reminiscent of a country lane, served up with orange juice and champagne, of course. Add a murder, Cait Morgan doing a fine turn as Sherlock Holmes and her friend Bud Anderson as Dr. Watson, and you have a sparkling, well-plotted and quite devious mystery in the cozy tradition, all pointing to Ace’s growing finesse at telling an entertaining story.
Peggy Blair writes like an author possessed, with story-telling skills that make her a must-read writer beyond the mystery genre. The Poisoned Pawn, a follow-up to her debut hit, The Beggar’s Opera, triggers caution in this reviewer in choosing adjectives that cannot do justice to the emotions this story provokes.
The Poisoned Pawn is fiction rooted in painful reality. The depth transcends physical, emotional and religious borders. Evil needs no passport.
Cuban police inspector Ricardo Ramirez arrives i n wintry Ottawa to bring back to Havana a priest possessing child pornography. While wearing clothes fit for a beach (and not skating on the Rideau Canal), Ramirez also learns of women dropping dead back home from a mystery toxin. Canada threatens a travel advisory. It’s a mix of public health, cross-border depravity and politics.
Using a good mystery plot, Blair uses layers of political deceit and religious deviance as means to an end. Little justice is served, and the depths of political expediency are exposed. Blair can tell a story with the best of them.