| Book Review Stranger than Fiction
by Eric McCormack
Truth may be stranger than fiction, butt it's not as satisfying -- witness the emptiness at the core of these real-life characters. I must admit I prefer the way fiction fills the void and makes the world cohere.
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| Book Review Death of a Victim
by Ellen Roseman
Brian Vallee ends the book with a list of women's shelters across Canada and some useful suggestions for reforming the criminal justice system.
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 | Killers
by Laurence Gough,
256 pages $8.95 TP
ISBN: 0575057823
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Book Review High on Plot
by Richard Perry
If Gough seems a tad distracted by his cops, love life, he nevertheless has not lost his sense of humour or his tensile style.
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| Book Review Nouveau but not Riche
by Pat Barclay
We live in a literary world where, broadly speaking, fiction garners the accolades while non-fiction makes the bucks.
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| Book Review I'm Okay, You're Not
by Fraser Sutherland
Was Yeo a psychopath' Impulsive and hungry for violent excitement, deceitful and manipulative, good at feigning mental illness when it suited him -- one can tick off Robert Hare's check-list.
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| Book Review Keeping Us Guessing
by John Doyle
Ian Stater has succeeded in writing another skilful, efficient thriller that is satisfactorily suspenseful. It isn't credible, but it does move along with enough grace and speed that any hint of hokum disappears.
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| Book Review A Parallel Universe
by Matthew Kudelka
Organized crime in Canada is a parallel universe with tenuous connections to reality as law-abiding people -- including the vast majority of Italian-Canadians, who hate the various forms of the Mafia at least as much as anyone else -- recognize it.
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| Book Review Coming Up the Hard Way
by Alexander Craig
Pollock's authority, both inside and outside prison, seems due to his native intelligence rather than his organizing skills -- his record, like that of so many of his fellow inmates, was one of very disorganized crime.
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| Book Review The Game is Afoot
by Michael Coren
It is this tantalizing autonomy, this streak of anarchy engendered by the best literature that makes Holmes what he is, made Conan Doyle what he was, and makes this Volume Such a poignant addition to the subject.
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| Book Review Provincially Piquant
by George Kaufman
These two collections serve to flesh out and personalize the history of this country. They show that this country's history is just as "exciting" as any other country's when it comes to colourful characters and crimes.
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| Book Review It Happened in Court
by Barbara MacKay
Both of these hooks could be classified as true crime, but perhaps more accurately they should be called "true law."
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| Interviews Murder, He Wrote
by Anne Denoon
In Peter Robinson's novels, the combination of mystery, suspense, and police procedure makes for criminally entertaining fiction.
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| Letters to Editor Letters to the Editor
Letters may be edited for length or to delete potentially libellous statements. Except in extraordinary circumstances, letters of more than 500 words will not be accepted for publication.
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| Essays Homicidally Ours
by Jack Batten
Canada's crime writers are doing a fine job of rounding up some unusual suspects.
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| Prose/Poetry A Touch of Panic
by L Wright
;He hung up, still smiling, and took his coffee out to the sun-porch. From here he could see down the hill into the town of Gibsons, and the small harbour where he kept the 'Sea Nymph', his 27-foot sailboat.
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| Profiles Scenes of the Crime
by Pat Barclay
Maggie Siggins reports on true stories that compel our belief.
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| First Novels First Novels - Touching Their Lives
by Gary Draper
While the story holds some sociological and historical interest, it is not impressive as fiction. The use of father and son to symbolize and contrast the older, more idealistic struggle and the current mode of criminal warfare is a bit too obvious.
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| Field Notes Field Notes - Notice of Eviction
by Rhea Tregebov
Writing really is an odd occupation, falling mostly outside the market system that dominates our cuIture's set of values.
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| Field Notes Field Notes - Pushing Crime
by David Skene-Melvin
The CWC is organized in regional chapters, each of which holds regular meetings that feature speakers on topics of interest to crime writers.
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| George Fetherling Last Words - Along Parallel Lines
by Alec McEwen
'A Calgary Herald' columnist named the 49th parallel "the longest undefended border in the world."
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Ayse Tuzlak
'Summer's ldyll' can he frustrating to read -- we are eager to satisfy our curiosity about many things that simply don't interest this boy. But it could not have been otherwise: this is the way he will remember this summer, and that is all that matters.
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 | Nicolette
by Robert Zend,
pages $12.95 TP
ISBN: 0921870213
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Roger Mason
Few novels succeed in conveying the nature of obsessive love as well as 'Nicolette'; and Zend's non-traditional techniques are instrumental in elucidating the way such a love begins, develops, and has its conclusion.
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 | Foreigner
by Robert J. Sawyer,
304 pages $5.99 MM
ISBN: 0441000177
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Clint Burnham
What is it about reading a mediocre novel that that gives me the illusion there's objective I can point to that makes the difference?
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Roger Mason
'King's Cross' is often gripping, but it requires a lot -- an awful lot -- of willing suspension of disbelief: saviours turn Lip as villains are about to press the trigger and enemies penetrate security cordons at will.
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reivews - Non-Fiction
by Janice Keefer
This is merely one man's overview of countries to whose languages and cultures he remains a stranger, a skeleton key opening only a vestibule -- rather than the complex heart -- of that house in which we must all, somehow, live and let live together.
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Poetry
by Alice Wart
Brebner works well in the long form, and there are a number of extended sequences here. One sequence deftly and subtly explores child abuse, another charts the nuances of a summer canoe trip.
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Poetry
by Bruce Whiteman
'This Desert Now' is the first of his books to be translated. It would be wonderful to have more of his work available in English.
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 | Ping & Pong
by Dennis Lee, David McPhail,
pages $14.95 TC
ISBN: 0002239965
|  | Tell The World
by Severn Suzuki,
Doubleday
32 pages $10.95 MM
ISBN: 0385254229
|  | Some of the Kinder Planets
by Tim Wynne-Jones,
144 pages $0 TC
ISBN: 0531094510
| | | Brewster Rooster
by Berny Lucas, Russ Willms, Russ Wilms,
32 pages $7.99 TP
ISBN: 0590748351
| | Little Tiger in the Chinese Night An Autobiography in Art
by Song Nan Zhang,
Demco Media
pages $15.15 TC
ISBN: 0606088059
|  | If You're Not from the Prairie . . .
by David Bouchard, Henry Ripplinger,
Simon & Schuster Children's
32 pages $5.99 MM
ISBN: 0689820356
| |  | A Dozen Million Spills
by Sean O. Huigin,
24 pages $4.95 TP
ISBN: 088753967X
|  | Estelle & the Self-Esteem Machine
by Jo Bannatyne-Cugnet, Leslie Bell,
32 pages $14.95 TC
ISBN: 0889950970
| | In the Company of Whales From the Diary of a Whale Watcher
by Alexandra Morton,
64 pages $16.95 LB
ISBN: 1551430002
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Children's Books Children's Books - What's Their Motivation?
by Rhea Tregebov
The first question we may be inclined to ask about any book being offered these days is: why has this book been written? What is the motivation? I think a book becomes merely and exclusively a commodity when it is written primarily for market reasons.
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| Children's Books Bye Bye, Blues
by Janet McNaughton
We are, with any luck at all, entering the post problem novel era of young adult literature. Virtually everyone agrees that the problem novel, like Eastern European Communism, has outlived its usefulness.
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| At Large At Large - Let the Children Speak
by Michael Coren
Consider this: a man knows what a woman likes to read, he knows as well as she does what a woman appreciates in literature and in fact is probably better able to judge women's literature than a woman herself.
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| Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - A Pioneer Theorist
by Douglas Fetherling
One of her most memorable descriptions concerns the time that Brown, having been educated at Toronto, the Sorbonne, and Cornell, was teaching at Cornell.
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| First Novel Award First Novel Award Shortlist
We're not telling until the next issue, but we can confide that the following have been selected as finalists for the 1993 SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award.
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