A Magpie's Smile
Non-series
Eugene
Meese
NeWest Press (Trade Paperback)
ISBN-10: 1-897126-42-5 (1897126425)
ISBN-13: 978-1-897126-42-4 (9781897126424)
Publication Date: May 2009
List Price: $12.95
Synopsis (from the publisher): When the scalped remains of a Jane Doe are discovered within the rubble of a demolished house, Detective Jake Fry is assigned the task of hunting down Calgary’s most disturbed murderer. Working against a rising body count and police department politics, Fry must relentlessly pursue a murderer with an agenda no one but he can comprehend. During Calgary’s first economic boom, people flocked from all corners of the country to the city rumoured to have streets paved in gold. Explore the dark side of this boom in A Magpie’s Smile, a tautly chronological police thriller and cinematic portrait of the frenetic Calgary of the 1970s.
Review: Calgary,
Alberta, the city many call Canada’s oil capital, is usually
associated with happy times like those at its world-famous Calgary
Stampede, its professional hockey and football games, and the still
talked about 1988 Winter Olympics. But in Eugene Meese’s debut
mystery, the city’s dark underside gets exposed - perhaps
overexposed for some - as a crazed serial killer murders and scalps
victims and a tormented Calgary Police Services homicide detective,
John Jacob ( “Jake” to his friends, “J.J.” to
his tormentors) Fry, struggles to find the perpetrator, always a
maddening step or two behind.
Meese’s novel has an experimental overlay. He uses time slots
instead of chapters to frame the story in a continuous run with back
stories to fill in information about his broken marriage, his time
spent with his son, his connection to his father, the death of his
first police partner, and bits of background information about various
characters. A quintessential anti-hero, forty-four-year-old Fry emerges
throughout the novel as a hard-nosed, old school cop, wary of his
colleagues, downright ornery with his supervisors, and impatient with
his subordinates, peers and any others who fail to meet his
lustily-opinionated standards. On his mostly hidden softer side, he
relaxes with woodworking projects while his cat, “Lips,”
watches. As well, he develops a relationship with Miyoko Fitzgerald,
the Glenbow Museum’s Assistant Curator, “[p]articularly of
the Native exhibits”, whose mixed race parentage and position at
the museum play an important role in the plot of the story. Her
Vancouver importer-exporter father, she says,
“’imported’ my mother from Japan.”
Setting his novel in the Calgary of the 1970s economic boom allows
Meese to introduce several situations of tension and drama.
There’s the ongoing racial strain between Indians and whites,
exacerbated by an inaccurate story leaked by Fry’s supervisor
blaming an Indian suspect for the scalpings. Then there’s the
suicide of an Indian lawyer frustrated with the lack of
officials’ political will to change conditions for his people.
Red-necked cops appear, too, and so do references to the influx of
Coasters looking for Calgary’s streets of gold and jobs in the
oil patch. Then there are the hookers, the homeless, and the addicts
who populate Fry’s world. Bottom-feeding scribes and photogs from
the Bulletin sensationalize the killings Fry tries to solve with help
from a professor at the University of Calgary, Miyoko at the Glenbow
and his own “blood into paper” police procedurals in the
forensic sifting through clues of fingernail scrapings from a leather
jacket and grass clippings from a crime scene. “ Big Nose,”
a Lysol-sipping suspect he interviews, turns out to be a victim who
narrowly escaped with his life. Others, though - a pretend prostitute,
a mid-twenties junkie drummer, and a couple of Nova Scotian job-seekers
– don’t get off as lucky. And even Fry and Miyoko come in
for their share of hair-raising adventures in the story’s
action-packed finale that reveals the demented perpetrator’s
bizarre logic for his deaths by scalping.
A former journalist, then a professor of journalism at King’s
College, Halifax, NS, and now a novelist, Meese sometimes strays into
academic stylistics – strained strings of repetitive phrases, for
example. Overall, though, he tells a good story, has created some
credible characters, sprinkled his story with Calgary landmarks and
icons, and left a number of openings for future adventures with the
irascible and insubordinate John Jacob (“Jake” or
“J.J.”) Fry and perhaps Miyoko and her carving of the good
luck/bad luck smiling magpie for which he promised to build a pedestal.
Special thanks to M. Wayne Cunningham (mw_cunningham@telus.net) for contributing his review of A Magpie's Smile.
Review Copyright © 2009 — M. Wayne Cunningham — All Rights Reserved — Reprinted with Permission
Have you read A Magpie's Smile? How would you rate it?
Novels by this author …
A Magpie's Smile
NeWest Press (Trade Paperback), May 2009
ISBN-10: 1-897126-42-5 (1897126425)
ISBN-13: 978-1-897126-42-4 (9781897126424)
Omnimystery keywords for A Magpie's Smile ...
Location(s) referenced: Calgary, Alberta.
