The Canary List: A Novel [Paperback]

Crockett Grey is a school teacher with the unfortunate tendency of mourning his deceased daughter at the bottom of a bottle of liquor. When one of his female students arrives at his house in the dead of night, terrified and begging for help, those memories of his daughter compel him to help her. This simple of act of help drags him into a world of false accusations, physical assault, and political and religious intrigue.

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Truth be told, had I realized that this was considered "Christian Fiction", I probably wouldn't have selected this book. Not really my genre. However, I'm glad I did. Though it suffered from a slow start (too many points of view without any initial cohesion), the author soon found his stride and I found myself involved, interested, and curious to see how it all ended.

I don't want to put anything terribly spoilerly in this review (is that even a word?), but I want to address genre since some of the other reviews have addressed it.

I read a ton of horror, paranormal, supernatural and spec fiction. This isn't horror and it's barely - maybe - paranormal/supernatural. I really would categorize this as a thriller.

I also didn't see an overtly Christian message, though as one reviewer says, there's a lot of anti-Catholic sentiment here. Now, I'm Catholic, so maybe there was a sensitivity here, but Catholics, the Vatican, priests, etc. do seem to be presented in a wholly negative light - even seen as evil. I don't think there was a good Catholic in the bunch. A good atheist, though, so again - not sure it's really a Christian message here.

However, it's fiction, so it didn't keep me from enjoying the story.

The writing style was engaging. Some of the characters were better developed than others. Jaimie, who I thought was a major character, remained largely one-dimensional to me. Crockett was very vivid.

I would say, if you like a good thriller, you might give this one a try. It doesn't quite reach a five star rating for me, but it's a solid four.

One final note: One of the reviewers mentioned the Da Vinci Code. Some of it takes place in Rome and the Vatican and there's religious intrigue all over the place, but it's not at all like the Da Vinci Code to me. The style, plot, etc are extremely different.

However, the author does want you to think of the Da Vinci Code when reading this. He even goes so far as having one of the characters reference Dan Brown toward the end of the book - just in case you didn't get that HE thinks this is a lot like the Da Vinci Code. It's not.

In Vatican City, Italy, the Pope is in an extended coma, leaving the Catholic Church with a dangerous power vacuum. On the other side of the world, in Santa Monica, California, 12-year-old Jaime--an orphan in foster care--thinks about Crockett Grey, the teacher of her Adaptive Behavior Classroom, and how he seems like he would be a really good dad. And in a room somewhere Dr. Madeleyne Mackenzie, child psychiatrist and Jaime's legal custodian, is celebrating a black mass with the other members of her coven.

Depending on the reader's religious orientation, "The Canary List" by Sigmund Brouwer can be read either as a faith-based thriller or as a fantasy with Christian overtones. Believers will enjoy Brouwer's narrative as a simplified response to Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code." Non-Christians, as embodied by the novel's central character, skeptic Crockett Grey, can enjoy the debate built into a storyline that avoids sermonizing while presenting some provoking arguments, such as whether or not demons and witches actually exist and whether murder or deceit is ever acceptable when committed for a greater good.

While all the characters are fairly stereotypical, the central players are likeable and the action is non-stop. The ending, delivered with a touch of sly humor, leaves room for further interpretation. Sometimes the dialogue is irritatingly repetitious or overly explanatory, suggesting the author had younger readers in mind. But, as Christian fiction, "The Canary List" should provide solid entertainment for its intended audience.

(Note that this review is based on an Advance Reading Copy that contained quite a few word-processing errors. Hopefully, these will be corrected before publication.)

First of all, not being familiar with the author, I was expecting a more usual mystery/sleuthing story and not a horror story so I was a bit taken aback to realize what I was really reading. I felt the characters and situations were often implausible, with lots of head-shaking moments of me thinking, "Why is he/she doing this?" However, the writer has a compelling way of pulling you into the story, and you want to know what happens next, even if you don't believe it. As a story-teller, he's very good. Once I started, I didn't want to stop reading until I knew what happened to all the characters.