A layered portrait of a changing city in the guise of a gripping crime novel, for fans of Tana French and Dennis Lehane.
The murder of two teenage girls in Toronto becomes an obsession for both a troubled city and a hard-boiled (but gourmet) detective.
Following an award-winning memoir, fiction for adults and children, a two-volume history of Canada, and 12 Canadian National Magazine Awards, Gillmor shows he has yet another trick up his sleeve. His first crime novel is narrated by police detective Jamieson Abel, a white law school dropout who gets along with exactly nobody on the corrupt Toronto force and is constantly in danger of getting canned before he can make it to retirement. He’s recently been partnered with Davis, a smart, well-spoken Black woman who’s the department’s only claim to diversity and its frequent media representative. As the novel opens, two high school track stars have been brutally murdered in St. James Town, a decaying high-rise community at the heart of multicultural Toronto: "The languages spoken in St. James Town in descending order of percentage are: English, Tagalog, Tamil, Unspecified Chinese, Mandarin, Korean, Spanish, Russian, Serbian, Bengali, Urdu, French, and Other." Under tremendous pressure from the mayor and media to solve this crime, Abel and Davis embark on a wild goose chase to locate the single, rather shaky suspect, a boyfriend of one of the girls. Meanwhile, mayhem in the area is on the rise: a sex worker is killed, one of the towers is burned to the ground, a local thug is the target of a jailhouse hit, large-scale new graffiti is going up nightly. Abel’s instincts tell him that somehow, everything is connected—and real estate values have something to do with it. As he obsessively tracks down leads, he sustains himself with martinis, espresso, and delicious meals for one. Food-loving readers may find themselves trying to replicate his sheet-pan salmon and a salad for which he “tossed together black beans, Kalamata olives, a sharp cheddar that had been aged for eight years, red pepper, and arugula, then made a dressing with olive oil, lime, jalapeños, and cumin.” Gillmor really knows his stuff—in a dazzling range of areas.
A layered portrait of a changing city in the guise of a gripping crime novel, for fans of Tana French and Dennis Lehane.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781771966900
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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