JACK BATTEN
Every City Is Every Other City By John McFetridge ECW, 368 pages, $19.95
The Canadian author John McFetridge has written eight solid and gritty crime novels. Now he’s giving his readers something unlike anything he’s produced before. “Every City Is Every Other City” is smart, funny, sly, whimsical and original. The central character is Gord Stewart, a Toronto guy who holds two jobs that dovetail nicely: He’s a private investigator who specializes in finding missing persons, and he’s a location scout, nailing down sites for specific film scenes. Gord’s current investigative case gets him on the search for a vanished regular citizen who may have committed suicide somewhere near Sudbury. Or maybe he fled to Calgary. At the same time, Gord’s new girlfriend, Ethel, who teaches Advanced Improv at Second City wakens his feminist side, an attitude that helps when some seriously threatening dudes get into the plot. But, typically, menace in this novel is closely followed by laughs when Ethel lets loose tales of old-timey female comics. Imogene Coca, anyone? Gracie Allen?
A Good Mother By Lara Bazelon Hanover Square, 368 pages, $21.99
In this California thriller, a beautiful young wife who’s also a new mother faces up to her husband who’s threatening damage to her. He’s a large, brutish, drunken military man. She stabs him in the heart. Self defence? Or murder? She’s put on trial, and what follows is a detailed and expert courtroom drama, one in which almost all the principal characters misbehave in one way or another. The judge is a bully. Both members of the defence team, male and female, provoke trouble at their respective homes that gets in the way of arguing on behalf of their client in the courtroom. Even the defendant seems to be damaging her own case. The narrative takes its own mildly confusing time in setting up the issues, but once the story hits the courtroom, the legal thrills just keep on coming.
The Last Thing He Told Me By Laura Dave Simon & Schuster, 320 pages, $35
Hannah Hall possesses the wise voice in this story. She may also be the character on the wrong end of all the luck. She’s 40-ish, married a year earlier for the first time to a dreamy guy, settled into life among the mildly bohemian types of the Sausalito boating community across the bay from San Francisco where she carefully builds a relationship with her new husband’s teenage daughter. Then the husband vanishes, leaving behind some big bucks problems that might mean serious trouble for Hannah herself. The only way to finesse her way out of the potential grief is for Hannah to track the missing hubby, a quest that takes her to Austin, Texas, where there’s fresh mystery galore. All of this, slightly predictable, stays tricky enough to keep the plot on the boil to the unpredictable climax.
Find You First By Linwood Barclay William Morrow, 448 pages, $34.99
Linwood Barclay is a whiz at the set ups to his stories, and this time out he’s in particularly devilish form. Miles Cookson, early forties, single and a self-made millionaire, discovers that he has the worst of all fatal diseases, Huntington’s. It also happens that, in his much younger, much less filthy rich years he sold his sperm which successfully impregnated nine women. Now he must locate the resulting nine children, all now of adult age, to warn them about the threat of inheriting the Huntington’s. At this point, Barclay begins to slide complications into the plot which grows ever deeper, more fearsome and endlessly delicious.