A Joanne Kilbourn Mystery series by Gail Bowen (Books 1~6 & 8~13)
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Overview: Bowen’s mystery novels feature Joanne Kilbourn, a widowed mother, political analyst and university professor who finds herself occasionally involved in criminal investigations in various parts of Saskatchewan.
Genre: Mystery
Deadly Appearances: Andy Boychuk is a successful Saskatchewan politician – until one sweltering August afternoon when the party faithful gather at a picnic. All of the key people in Boychuk’s life – family, friends, enemies – are there. Boychuk steps up to the podium to make a speech, takes a sip of water, and drops dead. Joanne Kilbourn, in her début as Canada’s leading amateur sleuth, is soon on the case, delving into Boychuk’s history. What she finds are a Bible college that’s too good to be true, a woman with a horrifying and secret past, and a murderer who’s about to strike again.
Murder at the Mendel: As a child Joanne was friends with Sally Love and her parents, but the friendship languished after Sally’s father died and she moved away, eventually becoming a very controversial artist. When the Mendel Gallery opens an exhibition of Sally’s work, Joanne is eager to attend and to renew their friendship. But it’s not so easy being Sally’s friend anymore, and soon Joanne finds herself ensnared in a web of intrigue and violence. When the director of a local private gallery is brutally murdered, Joanne finds that the past she and Sally share was far more complicated, and far more sordid, than she had realized.
The Wandering Soul Murders: Murder is the last thing on Joanne Kilbourn’s mind on a perfect morning in May. Then the phone rings, and she learns that her daughter Mieka has found the corpse of a young woman in an alley near her store. So begins Joanne’s chilling collision with evil in Gail Bowen’s riveting third mystery, The Wandering Soul Murders.
Joanne is stunned and saddened by the news that the dead woman, at seventeen, was already a veteran of the streets. When, just twenty-four hours later, her son’s girlfriend is found dead, drowned in a lake in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley, Joanne’s sunny world is shattered. Her excitement about Mieka’s upcoming marriage, her involvement in the biography she is writing, even her pleasure at her return to Regina all fade as she finds herself drawn into a twilight world where money can buy anything and there are always people willing to pay.
A Colder Kind of Death: When a prisoner is shot to death in the exercise yard of a Saskatchewan penitentiary, Joanne Kilbourn finds herself haunted by a part of her past she wished had never happened. The dead prisoner is Kevin Tarpley, the man who six years earlier had brutally killed her politician husband, Ian, in a seemingly senseless act alongside the TransCanada Highway.
The haunting takes on a more menacing cast several days later when Tarpley’s sinister wife, Maureen, is discovered dead in a snow-swept Regina parking lot. A brightly coloured scarf is found wound tightly around her neck, a scarf that belongs to none other than Joanne Kilbourn. Soon this single mother, author, university professor, and TV-show panelist is deemed the “number one” suspect in Maureen Tarpley’s demise.
Joanne knows there has to be a connection between these two murders. But what is it? A cryptic letter sent to Joanne by Kevin Tarpley just days before his death intimates that Ian Kilbourn’s killing may not have been as senseless as first assumed. In fact, there are hints that some of Ian’s political colleagues may have been involved. But how deeply and in what way?
Then there’s the faded photograph of a pretty young woman and her baby that Joanne finds tucked in the wallet of her dead husband. Does it offer any clue to Ian’s murder, or to the deaths of the Tarpleys? Warily, Joanne Kilbourn is forced to follow a tangled trail deep into a heartbreaking past she never knew existed.
A Killing Spring: Gail Bowen, winner of the 1995 Arthur Ellis Award for best crime novel for her last Joanne Kilbourn mystery, A Colder Kind of Death, is back – with her most daring mystery to date.
In the horrifying opening paragraph of A Killing Spring, Reed Gallagher, the head of the School of Journalism at the university where Joanne Kilbourn teaches, is found dead in a seedy rooming house. He is dressed in women’s lingerie, with an electric cord around his neck. Suicide, the police say. A clear case of accidental suicide. But for Joanne, who takes on the thankless task of breaking the news to Gallagher’s wife, this death is just the first in a series of misfortunes that rock her life, both professional and personal.
A few days after Gallagher’s death, the School of Journalism is vandalized – its offices and computers are trashed, and homophobic graffiti are sprayed everywhere. Then an unattractive and unpopular journalism student in Joanne’s politics class stops coming to school after complaining to an unbelieving Joanne that she’s being sexually harassed. Clearly, all is not as well at the university as Joanne had thought. Nor is all well in her love life after the casual racism of a stranger drives a wedge between Joanne and her lover, Inspector Alex Kequahtooway. To make matters worse, Joanne is unceremoniously fired by her best friend from the weekly political panel on Nationtv, which she’s being doing for years.
Badly shaken by these calamities, Joanne struggles to carry cheerfully on. Action, she knows, is better for her than moping. She decides to find out why her student has stopped coming to class, and in doing so, Joanne steps unknowingly into an on-campus world of fear and deceit and murder.
Verdict in Blood: In Verdict in Blood, Joanne’s good friend Hilda McCourt is visiting her in Regina, Saskatchewan, when Judge Justine Blackwell’s corpse is found sprawled across one of the limestone slabs of the Boy Scout memorial in Wascana Park. Blackwell, known for the harsh sentences she’s handed down over the years, had lately been seeking out people she’d once incarcerated and trying to help them. Had she had a genuine change of heart, or had she been getting senile? Even the fearsome judge herself had wondered. Just the night before her death, she’d asked Hilda to make an assessment of her mental condition.
Now she’s dead, the matter is urgent: Which of her two wills should prevail – the one leaving everything to her daughters, including the famous sixties singer Lucy Blackwell, or the one leaving it all to Culhane House, a halfway house for ex-cons? Whoever stood to lose could be her murderer, and Hilda has to decide. Before too long, Joanne (who has problems enough of her own with her lover, Alex, and his troubled nephew, Eli) finds herself once again embroiled in intrigue.
The Glass Coffin: In this chilling tale of the terrible power of the ties that both bind us and blind us, Gail Bowen has given us her best novel yet. Brimming with the author’s characteristic empathy for the troubled, The Glass Coffin explores the depth of tragedy that a camera’s neutral eye can capture – and cause.
Canada’s favourite sleuth, Joanne Kilbourn, is dismayed to learn who it is that her best friend, Jill Osiowy, is about to marry. Evan MacLeish may be a celebrated documentary filmmaker, but he’s a cold fish who not only has already lost two wives to suicide, but has exploited their lives – and deaths – by making acclaimed films about them. Not even Jill appears to be particularly fond of him, and Jo is appalled to learn that her friend is marrying Evan primarily to become stepmother to his teenaged daughter, Bryn. Even Bryn hates her father for having filmed her all of her short life. It’s obvious to Joanne that this is stony ground on which to found a marriage. What is not obvious is that it is about to get bloodsoaked.
The Last Good Day: The ninth novel of Gail Bowen’s popular series finds Canada’s favourite amateur sleuth, Joanne Kilbourn, on holiday at a cottage borrowed from a lawyer friend, one of a cluster of summer homes owned by lawyers from the same prestigious firm. When one of them kills himself the night after a long talk with Joanne, she is pushed into investigating just what her neighbours are involved with, an investigation that has startling – and fatal – consequences.
Bowen’s depiction of this community of lawyers, each in his or her way now divorced from the ideals of justice and mercy that once motivated them all, is both compassionate and hard-nosed. There is Zack, the charming but controlling paraplegic; Blake and Lily, whose daughter, Gracie, struggles to keep her dignity as her parents’ marriage falls apart; Noah, who would rather practise carpentry than the law, and his wife, Delia, who is consumed by worry about the firm. The mounting stress among these lawyers is palpable as Joanne delves into their lives. And Joanne faces her own personal anxieties too when she discovers that her former lover, Inspector Alex Kequahtooway, is mixed up in what seems to be some very sordid legal business.
The Endless Knot: When journalist Kathryn Morrissey’s sensational book on the lives of thirteen adult children of prominent Canadians is published, one of the parents, Sam Parker, is furious enough to take a pot shot at the author, grazing her shoulder. Charges are laid, and Joanne’s new beau, Zack Shreve, is hired by Parker as his defence counsel. At the trial, which Joanne is covering for NationTV, Shreve focuses the jury’s attention not on who shot whom, but on why — on the ethics governing the relationship between a journalist and her subject.
Morrissey’s betrayal of her subjects opens up questions about an even more serious betrayal — the betrayal of children by their parents. While everyone condemns Parker for taking a gun to Morrissey, no one can fault his defence of his only child, Glen, a transsexual. The mutual love and commitment between this father and child stands in stark contrast to the alienation between Howard Dowhaniuk, Saskatchewan’s former premier, and his son, Charlie.
On the day of the verdict, Morrissey is brutally murdered, and Joanne’s investigation quickly has her trying to unravel the endless knot of the relationship between parent and child.
The Brutal Heart: With a general election just weeks away, Joanne Kilbourn is following the campaign of Ginny Monaghan, a woman who has her eyes set on the leadership of the federal Conservative Party and whose success depends, not so much on the election-day poll, but on the outcome of a custody battle she’s fighting with her ex. Joanne thinks this is perfect material for a TV program she’s putting together on women and party politics. Happy to be back in the political fray that used to be her life during her first marriage, Joanne is soon also glad of the distraction it provides. A local call girl has been murdered — a woman whose regular clientele included several of Regina’s most prominent lawyers, including — until he met Joanne — her own husband, Zach Shreve.
Her new marriage creaking under the strain of this revelation, Joanne throws herself into her project — and into finding out why the dead woman had started to threaten her clients with blackmail, an investigation that leads to the truth — and to death.
The Nesting Dolls: Just hours before her body is found in a car in a parking lot, a young woman hands her baby to a perfect stranger and disappears. The stranger is the daughter of Delia Wainberg, a lawyer in the same firm as Joanne Kilbourn’s husband. One close look at the child suggests that there might be a family relationship, and soon the truth about the child Delia gave up for adoption years ago comes out. The boy must be Delia’s grandson. Then his mother is found dead, sexually assaulted and murdered. Not only is there a killer on the loose, but the dead woman’s partner is demanding custody of the child.
Kaleidoscope: "Security for any one of us lies in greater abundance for all of us." For many years, this was the core of Joanne’s political beliefs, but for a number of reasons, she has drifted away from it. But on the day Joanne retires from her university teaching post, she has a dream about her first husband (murdered many years ago), and this line comes back vividly in it.
Soon, she is forced to experience the truth of what, for most of her life, had just been a good closing line for a political speech. The night after Jo and Zack have dinner with Zack’s colleague Margot and one of his law firm’s biggest clients, the developer Leland Hunter, Jo and Zack’s house is blown up. They’re at the lake with daughter Taylor and their dogs, but the house is destroyed. And that is only the first of several terrible incidents. It isn’t long before Joanne is witness to events far more distressing than even a destroyed home. She begins to understand what it’s like to live in a world where she can count on nothing.
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