These Mysteries Play April Fool Tricks

Tomorrow is April Fool's Day, and although I've never been a fan of its tradition of pranks (they often seem more cruel than funny), it really is an appropriate day for the mystery writer's penchant for fooling readers via surprise plot twists and red-herring clues. Here are three good novels that specifically play on the April Fool theme. April Fool by William Herbert Deverell, a well-known Canadian author and criminal lawyer, won the 2006 Arthur Ellis Award for best novel. It's just one entry in his series featuring the classically trained, self-doubting Arthur Beauchamp, QC, of the British Columbia criminal bar. Beauchamp is enjoying his retirement as a hobbyist farmer on B.C.’s Garibaldi Island when he is dragged back to court to defend an old client, Nick "the Owl" Faloon, once one of the world’s top jewel thieves. The diminutive Faloon has been accused of the unlikely rape and murder of a psychologist, and the combination of courtroom thriller and whodunit takes the reader on an entertaining ride of twists and turns. Another Canadian favorite of mine, Louise Penny, penned The Cruelest Month (referring to April), which won the 2008 Agatha Award for best novel. It is the third novel in her series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and the small Canadian town of Three Pines. The tale involves a group of friends who visit a haunted house in Three Pines in the hope of ridding it of evil spirits. When one ends up dead, apparently of fright, Gamache and team investigate, and Gamache soon faces some old ghosts of his own. Finally, for fans of historial mystery settings and H.R.F. Keating, the noted English crime fiction writer best known for his series featuring Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID, there is A Remarkable Case of Burglary. The story begins on the morning of April Fools' Day in 1871, as Val Leary--handsome, charming and broke--notices a young maidservant scrubbing the steps of a home as he walks through one of London's wealthiest districts. He is instantly inspired by the idea of a "remarkable burglary," but the seemingly perfect set-up soon gets complicated in the upstairs-downstairs world of Victorian England. For more April Fool's fare, see http://mysteryreadersinc.blogspot.com/2015/04/april-fools-day-mysteriesapril-fools.html

Finding Mysteries North of the Border

I recently began reading the best-selling How the Light Gets In by award-winning Canadian mystery author Louise Penny. It's another entry in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series set in the Quebec village of Three Pines; this time, Gamache comes to the tiny town as a personal favor to look into the disappearance of a once-famous woman, only to find himself stalked by the same evil that turned her village sanctuary into a deadly trap. Since Penny is one of my favorites, I began to think about other Canadian mystery writers to explore. One place to start is the list of winners of the Arthur Ellis Award for Canadian crime fiction (named after the nom de travail of Canada's official hangman). The award is given annually to authors residing in Canada (regardless of original nationality) as well as Canadian-born authors. The 2014 Ellis winner for best crime novel is The Devil's Making by Sean Haldane, a psychotherapist/neuropsychologist and poet. The mystery's protagonist is a young English-immigrant policeman in Victorian-era British Columbia, who seeks to solve the murder of an American "alienist" (archaic term for psychiatrist) while navigating the tensions between Native American, British and American residents in the colonial outpost of Victoria. Two more Ellis Award honorees are Giles Blunt, author of the 2013 Ellis crime fiction winner Until the Night, which is part of his popular John Cardinal series set in fictional Algonquin Bay, Ontario, and Peter Robinson, the English-born Canadian resident who produced the popular Inspector Alan Banks series set in the villages of Yorkshire, which spawned BBC's "DCI Banks" TV series. Beyond the Ellis awards, there is Man Booker Prize finalist Emma Donoghue, an Irish-born Canadian resident, whose new mystery Frog Music follows the efforts of a French burlesque dancer in 1876 boomtown San Francisco to solve the murder of her friend, a notorious and secretive young woman, in a "lyrical tale of love and bloodshed." Even though she is a U.S. writer, I think personal favorite Kathy Reichs deserves a place among the Canadians when her forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan mysteries (basis for the "Bones" TV series) are set in Quebec and based on her actual experience with the Laboratoire des Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale of Quebec province. For more top-notch Canadian crime fiction, see the Arthur Ellis Award finalists and winners at http://www.stopyourekillingme.com/Awards/Ellis_Awards.html