In
recent weeks I have read the five books on the shortlist for the 2016 Arthur
Ellis Award for Best Canadian Crime Novel. The winner was Open Season by
Peter Kirby. This post has my ranking of the shortlist.
Coming
in 5th was The Night Bell by Inger Ash Wolfe
(pseudonym for Michael Redhill) while Hungry
Ghosts by Peggy Blair was 4th.
While
I love Hazel Micallef as a character I have not enjoyed the last two books in
the series as much as the first two books. The
Night Bell saw Hazel return to the character she was in the opening books.
I
found several similarities between Hungry
Ghosts and The Night Bell.
Each
dealt with a contemporary social issue. In The
Night Bell it was the abuse of children in institutional care decades ago.
In Hungry Ghosts it was the murder of
indigenous women and prostitutes.
Both
books looked decades back into the youth of a lead character. In The Night Bell it was Hazel as a
teenager in a middle class family residing in a small town in Ontario. In Hungry Ghosts it was Ottawa police
officer, Charlie Pike, going back in his mind to his teenage years when he was
a runaway from an Indian Residential School living on the streets of Winnipeg
and surviving on what he could steal by break-and-enters.
There
were three story lines involved in each of the plots. I found they came
together more successfully in Hungry
Ghosts.
Normally
I am not fond of the paranormal in crime fiction but I found the ghosts
haunting Inspector Ramirez in Hungry
Ghosts intriguing especially their efforts to communicate without words.
The Storm Murders by
John Farrow was 3rd best. It does not involve great social issues
but is a sophisticated police procedural.
What
put The Storm Murders ahead of The Night Bell and Hungry Ghosts was a wickedly clever and ingeniously simple method
of murder. As I rarely can work out how fictional murders are committed before
the sleuths I may be giving too much credit to Farrow. Yet I could not figure
how there were no footprints in the fresh snow outside a murder scene but the
investigating police officers cannot find the killer during a search of every
room in the house and are killed before backup police can arrive.
It
was also interesting for the retired Inspector Emile Cinq-Mars to involve his
wife, Sandra, in the investigation.
There
were two issues that kept the book from being ranked higher. There was a
connection between murder victims in Quebec and New Orleans that should have
been identified by the police far sooner in the book. As well, the Hollywood
style conclusion was not credible and clashed with the skilled police work in
the rest of the book.
Second best was A Killing in Zion by Andrew Hunt which involved murder in Salt Lake
City during the Great Depression.
It ranked ahead of the earlier three books
because it involved a unique assignment, a difficult task when you have read a
lot of crime fiction, for a police officer. Early in the book Detective
Lieutenant Art Oveson is appointed head of the newly established Anti-Polygamy
Squad.
Oveson is tasked with prosecuting the
fundamentalist Mormon men who have disregarded edicts of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints to abandon polygamy. They are carrying on with
plural marriages being officially married to only one woman and “sealed” to
many more.
His investigation into the murder of a leader
of a fundamentalist sect takes Oveson into deep into the organization. Two
evils of such sects, the taking of child brides and the banishment of surplus
teenage boys, were as much a problem 80 years ago as they are today.
A Killing in Zion did
not reach the top for me because of another Hollywood ending that was even more
extreme than The Storm Murders.
First was Open
Season by Peter Kirby. I agree with the panel judging the Award that Open Season was the best of the
shortlist. (I choose again not to say where the books on the shortlist would
have ranked overall with regard to the Canadian crime books I read in 2015.)
Detective Inspector Luc Vanier is a wonderful
character. While struggling with commitment concerning his girlfriend he is a
thorough, imaginative and dedicated Montreal police officer.
The investigation he conducts with Detective
Sargeant Saint Jacques is meticulous as they work to resolve the kidnapping of
a Guatemalan journalist whose application for refugee status in Canada has been
denied before she was abducted.
I had reservations about the lack of
dimension in the villains but what made Open
Season the best for me is that it was the only book of the quintet that I
found a page turner. I was drawn through the book faster than any other on the
shortlist. I cannot clearly explain what kept the pages turning but they flowed
by.
Having chosen Open Season as the best I would say that none of the shortlist this
year was a great book. They were good to very good but not more.
