Deadly appearances (Hardcover)

Jo Anne Kilbourn is a wonderful character, a woman who can't seem to not get involved when a man she worked with in Canadian Politics is murdered by poison in front of a crowd, herself included. Digging into the past of the politician, however, she unearths that all might not be how it seemed, and soon wonders how many people she can trust that she has trusted her entire adult life.

A character with a solid family, Jo Anne is a bright and interesting widower, and a smart amateur sleuth to boot. On that basis alone, this was a pleasure to read.

The pleasure ends with the villain. I don't want to give the book away, but who the villain is and and the villain's motive for murder set my teeth on edge. .... It's tiring, insulting, and done far too often in fiction.

That said, the rest of the book propelled me forward in the Jo Anne Kilbourn series, and I have loved the rest dearly, right up to "Burying Ariel."

Check it out, just get ready to flinch, in a bad way, at the villain.

In the course of her investigations she meets a close friend of Andy's whom she feels an affinity to and whom her children also like. She starts feeling that life might be good after all and that there is a chance for happiness for herself.

But then she gets sick. Repeated visits to doctors cannot determine any physical reasons for her illness and she starts wondering whether she might be going mad.

This is as much as I am going to reveal. Gail Bowen's debut novel is one of the best crime novels ever. It features believable, three-dimensional characters the reader learns to care about. Joanne Kilbourne is the mother-next-door and then she is something rather different because she is capable of seeing a thing she believes in through, no matter what (not that most of us are not). Unlike a hero in a movie, she has her self-doubts and bad moments; when a doctor tells her there is nothing wrong with her physically she assumes - like we all would - it's in her head. But she keeps on doing what she feels necessary. Most of all she is a real person. She has a family and is ensconced in a social network - and Bowen lets us into Joanne's thought processes.

The end is logical - and totally unexpected.

I borrowed Deadly Appearances from my local suburban Australian library in early 1999; since then I have bought all her novels to date and I keep scanning magazines for new ones. My mother-in-law borrowed Deadly Appearances in May 2000; since then she has just requested the next one every single time she's finished one. And if they have been translated into German, they'll make a fantastic present for my mother, my sisters and all of my friends.

And next time I go and visit my sister in Toronto I'll make sure to have a stop-over in Regina to tour Bowen-Country.