Three Great Reads!

BEN FOX, a book lover with a mission to help authors meet more readers, asked me again to post my three favourite reads of the year on his website, something I have done for the past few years. Given that there are still seven weeks of good reading this year, my picks are not definitive for 2025. But I was able to come up with three books that I especially enjoyed in the past several months by three outstanding contemporary writers: Rebecca Makkai, Barbara Fradkin, and Giles Blunt.

Check out my post by clicking here.

I'm a mystery writer, so it’s not surprising that my top read this year, I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai, is a work of crime fiction. And so much more as well.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Makkai explores the moral implications of class, race and misogyny, all within a framework of deconstructing an old murder case.

Bodie Kane, a 40-year-old film studies professor and podcaster, returns to the elite New Hampshire boarding school where she was a student more than two decades earlier. She’s been invited to teach a two-week podcasting course, and the topic she proposes is the 1995 murder of her classmate, Thalia Keith, in their senior year. The conviction of the school’s Black athletics trainer, in prison since shortly after the murder, has been hotly debated over the years. As her students become fascinated by Thalia’s case, Bodie comes to see just how flawed the police investigation was and realizes that the trainer was probably wrongfully convicted.

And she finds herself seething about the sexual abuse she and her female classmates once accepted as normal. “I could only now calculate the full, ugly weight of it,” she says.

Multi-layered, with a cast of compelling characters, and a plethora of subplots which Makkai deftly juggles, I Have Some Questions For You is a thoughtful exploration of the reach of social media; the exploitation of real people for “entertainment” by the true-crime genre; the pervasiveness of violence against women; and the fragility of memory. Not the usual subjects of whodunits; consequentially, a book that is slower in pace, less plot-driven and more contemplative than typical crime fiction. But nevertheless a book that deserves to be read and savored for its own merits.

Barbara Fradkin’s Shipwrecked Souls is another contemporary crime novel with a social and political focus. The 12^th instalment in Fradkin’s popular Inspector Michael Green Series finds the veteran Ottawa homicide inspector sidelined in an administrative job and yearning for active duty. When an elderly woman is found murdered in a back alley, Green can’t resist getting involved in the investigation by helping rookie homicide detective Josh Krammer, who just happens to be dating his daughter.

The murdered woman is identified as Anya Kurchenko, who was visiting Canada from Ukraine in search of information about her past. The story touches on the current war in Ukraine, but its real thrust goes back to the Holocaust and the Nazi atrocities during the Second World War. Green’s persistence pays off in solving not just one, but two murders, and in uncovering secrets in his own family’s past.

Fradkin knows her historical material, but Shipwrecked Souls isn’t a history lesson. One of Canada’s top crime fiction writers, Fradkin is a master storyteller, and she has produced another fast-paced thriller, with well-drawn characters, a vivid Ottawa setting, and enough twists and turns to keep readers turning pages until the satisfying end.

Giles Blunt, author of the award-winning John Cardinal Mysteries, has moved away from crime fiction. With his historical romance, Bad Juliet, he takes readers to Saranac Lake in upstate New York in 1917, at that time a sanatorium town where tuberculosis patients “took the cure.” Paul Gascoyne, a young aspiring poet, lands a job tutoring invalids in literature and the craft of writing. He meets a beautiful patient, Sarah Ballard, who has survived the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, and encourages her to write a memoir. Sarah has a suitor, Jasper Keene, a Broadway playwright, and the story evolves into a love triangle, with both men vying for Sarah’s affections.

Their story is narrated decades later by an aging Paul, who is still trying to make sense of these events that shaped his life.

Bad Juliet is driven by psychological suspense, rather than the whodunit puzzles of Blunt’s earlier books. Sarah is an enigma to Paul. The first indication of her duplicity is that she has lied to the couple who befriended her after her rescue from the Lusitania, letting them believe she was their late son’s fiancée. Paul begins to wonder how much of what Sarah says is trustworthy. He comes to realize that her memoir is a tangle of truth and fiction, but he can’t break his obsession with her.

With its Adirondacks setting, well-drawn characters, and nuanced prose, Bad Juliet is a winner. And a promise of more great reads from Giles Blunt.