Asylum

January 12, 2015
Martine LeDuc, the publicity director for the city of Montreal and a wonderfully likable narrator, partners with offbeat police detective Julian Fletcher in this absorbing mystery from de Beauvoir (Murder Most Academic). As Martine and Julian look into the murders of four women found posed on park benches throughout the city over a period of months, they begin to suspect that the killings are linked to one of Montreal’s most shameful scandals, the Duplessis Orphans. In the 1950s, children separated from mostly unwed mothers in the very Catholic province of Quebec were transferred from orphanages to mental hospitals as a means to secure greater funding. Inhabitants of these hellholes served as guinea pigs for experiments performed for pharmaceutical companies. Now someone is willing to kill in order to avoid opening old wounds. De Beauvoir does a fine job of evoking the ambiance of Montreal, with its fascinating neighborhoods, bilingualism, and political tensions. Agent: Lukas Ortiz, Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency.

January 1, 2015
An unlikely sleuth seeks to protect Montreal's cachet as a tourist destination by tracking down a killer whose handiwork is trashing the city's reputation.Martine LeDuc is nobody's idea of a detective. As directrice de publicite for Mayor Jean-Luc Boulanger, her job is public relations, not homicide investigation. But when a fourth woman is found reclining on one of the city's park benches, naked, raped and dead, Martine's boss calls on her to coordinate communications between Police Director Francois Desrocher and his own office because everyone else is too busy. Martine, faced with a particularly awkward situation because her deputy, Richard Rousseau, had been seeing research librarian Danielle Leroux, the most recent victim, partners with Detective-lieutenant Julian Fletcher of the city police to track down the murderer. Even though the four victims were of different ages, social classes and walks of life, they all had a connection to the Cite de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu Asylum, notorious in retrospect for its habit half a century earlier of taking in illegitimate children, denying them any education or vocational training, and forcing them to hard labor. The truth about the asylum, the unlikely sleuthing pair discover, is much grimmer than that. Considering that this isn't Martine's line of work, or even her hobby, her discoveries come with disconcerting ease and swiftness; she barely takes a wrong step until the villain takes her captive in a tunnel beneath the asylum and injects a cocktail of drugs into her, cackling all the while about what he's going to do if she's not rescued in time. An afterword by de Beauvoir roots the mystery in real-life events that sound just as depressing, though a good deal less improbable and melodramatic.

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February 15, 2015
There is a serial killer loose in Montreal, and the mayor asks Martine LeDuc, his director of PR, to act as liaison with the police department. Four women have been killed, their bodies left posed obscenely on park benches. When the police charge a homeless man with the murders, Martine is afraid the real killer is still at large. Luckily, renegade police detective Julian Fletcher is as convinced as Martine of the homeless man's innocence, and the two continue to investigate on their own. Martine uncovers a link between the four women: all were involved with the decades-old Duplessis orphanage scandal. Orphanages found they could get more money from the government if the orphans were mentally ill, so the children were sent to asylums, where many of them received lobotomies, electroshock treatments, and hallucinogens. The story alternates between the present-day investigation and the first-person story of one of the orphans, an approach that succeeds in giving the tragedy a human dimension. A complex and heartbreaking mystery.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)