EAST OF SUEZ
By Howard Engel, Penguin Canada, 344 pages, $13.50
PI Benny Cooperman still has memory problems, but when an old friend goes missing, Benny sets off for the sunny island where his friend runs a scuba-diving business. There he meets several charming locals, any one of whom could be responsible for his friend's disappearance, and bodies begin appearing.
HOLDING STILL FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE
By Zoe Whittall, Anansi, 299 pages, $18.95
Whittall's second novel, set among the twenty-somethings of Toronto, is narrated by former pop star Billy, who is just breaking up with her long-time girlfriend, and paramedic Josh and sophisticated film girl Amy, who are in the last throes of their own long relationship.
THE ANGEL'S GAME
By Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated by Lucia Graves, Anchor Canada, 531 pages, $22
Ruiz Zafón first came to the attention of the English-language world with The Shadow of the Wind, a breathtaking literary thriller. In this later novel, set in Barcelona in the 1920s, novelist David Martin receives an offer from a mysterious publisher to write a book for which “people will live and die.”
WILD PITCH
By A.B. Guthrie, Bison Books, 224 pages, $20.95
THE GENUINE ARTICLE
By A.B. Guthrie, Bison Books, 180 pages, $20.95
Journalist and author Guthrie, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1949 novel The Way West, also produced a series of hard-boiled detective mysteries set in Montana, including these two. In Wild Pitch, a prominent citizen is shot by a sniper at the annual town picnic, and Sheriff Chick Charleston, with the assistance of 17-year-old amateur sleuth Jason Beard, tracks down the shooter. The Genuine Article is set a few years later; Chick is chief of police and Jason is his deputy, just back from college, and the victim is a much hated rancher who turns up dead at his own back door.
