Mysteries and Saskatchewan
Oct. 17th, 2005 07:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dewline"Something was lost, but something was found."
I believe that's part of the closing words of Gail Bowen's Murder at the Mendel. And it's a good way to describe how most of Professor Bowen's stories featuring Joanne Kilbourn turn out.
Kilbourn is by turns a politician's wife turned widow, a mother by blood and by adoption several times, a professor, a TV commentator, a lover to a very select handful of men over the years since her husband's death, and a woman who stumbles on occasion every couple of years through solving a murder mystery in various parts of her home province of Saskatchewan.
I'd started reading the novels a couple of years after the movies featuring Wendy Crewson as a Toronto-fied ex-cop variant of Joanne finished hitting CTV's "rented-from-the-feds" airwaves. I suppose part of the charm for me was -- still is -- the fact that they are set in Saskatchewan, the province of my birth. Another part is that she's simply a very good writer.
That catchphrase that seems to govern the messes that Prof. Kilbourn stumbles into and out of holds true again with The Last Good Day. A new acquaintance dies the very night Kilbourn meets him for the first time, and the investigation that his suicde triggers leads to a final fall from grace for an old friend of hers, and possibly a new love for the long haul. I'll insist that you see for yourselves how that all happens by either buying or borrowing The Last Good Day as soon as you can.
And don't worry about missing details from earlier novels. Prof. Bowen does a fine job of making sure all the needed details of the backstories of all recurring characters is right where you need it: on the pages of this novel.
Not that that should stop you from picking up the others if you find you like this one...
I believe that's part of the closing words of Gail Bowen's Murder at the Mendel. And it's a good way to describe how most of Professor Bowen's stories featuring Joanne Kilbourn turn out.
Kilbourn is by turns a politician's wife turned widow, a mother by blood and by adoption several times, a professor, a TV commentator, a lover to a very select handful of men over the years since her husband's death, and a woman who stumbles on occasion every couple of years through solving a murder mystery in various parts of her home province of Saskatchewan.
I'd started reading the novels a couple of years after the movies featuring Wendy Crewson as a Toronto-fied ex-cop variant of Joanne finished hitting CTV's "rented-from-the-feds" airwaves. I suppose part of the charm for me was -- still is -- the fact that they are set in Saskatchewan, the province of my birth. Another part is that she's simply a very good writer.
That catchphrase that seems to govern the messes that Prof. Kilbourn stumbles into and out of holds true again with The Last Good Day. A new acquaintance dies the very night Kilbourn meets him for the first time, and the investigation that his suicde triggers leads to a final fall from grace for an old friend of hers, and possibly a new love for the long haul. I'll insist that you see for yourselves how that all happens by either buying or borrowing The Last Good Day as soon as you can.
And don't worry about missing details from earlier novels. Prof. Bowen does a fine job of making sure all the needed details of the backstories of all recurring characters is right where you need it: on the pages of this novel.
Not that that should stop you from picking up the others if you find you like this one...
