The Night Bell

May 30, 2016
The pseudonymous Wolfe’s provocative yet ponderous fourth Hazel Micallef mystery (after 2012’s Door in the River) highlights the mistreatment of those at the margins. After residents of a new housing development in Port Dundas, Ontario, begin finding bones in their yards, the police comb an adjacent field. Behind an old orphanage that abuts it, they discover bones from 18 adolescent boys, all of them murder victims. Meanwhile, an officer is kidnapped, and three people associated with the development are savagely murdered. The Mounties take over the case, displacing Hazel and her team, but the 64-year-old detective inspector remains determined to identify the dead children, rescue her colleague, and bring past and present criminals to justice. Flashbacks to 1957 follow 14-year-old Hazel’s efforts to locate a missing teenager. Factual and thematic ties bind the two story lines and provide the foundation for a sprawling mystery with emotional heft, but Wolfe’s attempts to raise stakes and add a ticking clock render the plot improbable. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Literary.

In this fourth installment (A Door in the River, 2012, etc.), Ontario police inspector Hazel Micallef becomes intimately involved in a case connecting back to her childhood.The trouble starts with Tournament Acres, a new housing development in Port Dundas that has fallen short of its promises. Unhappy tenants find bones on the empty land intended to become a golf course, and soon DI Micallef is in the office of property manager Brendan Givens. He's being harassed and wants protection, and tenants want something done about the development's failures, but these problems seem like child's play when the bones turn out to be human. Micallef orders the land, which used to belong to the Dublin Home for Boys, to be canvassed. This task yields even more bones, but during the search, an officer goes missing after a threatening voice speaks over his radio. The situation intensifies further when a couple from the development is brutally murdered overnight (in a scene that will give you chills). It becomes clear that something much larger is going on at Tournament Acres, and it goes back decades--Dublin Home has been in ruin for years. The realization that the bones belong to adolescent boys hits Micallef hard, since her brother, Alan, was adopted from a similar home in the 1950s. This takes the narrative back to 1957, when troubled Alan is suspected of foul play when a teenage girl goes missing. To complicate things, Micallef and her friend Gloria Whitman, the daughters of the mayor and the town doctor respectively, are the last to see the girl alive. The two timelines feel like separate stories for most of the book, but you're safe to suspect that the dots will be connected--though with great haste. Wolfe's main character is alert, hard-bitten, and extremely loyal, and it's a pleasure to get to know her more deeply through her precocious younger self. The pleasure runs out by the final chapters, which read like a chaos of competing sounds; you'll be deafened before the final note. DI Micallef is sure to win your favor, but expect your initial excitement to slowly fizzle out. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 1, 2016
Murder hits close to home again for Port Dundas, Ontario, Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef when young boys' bones are discovered in a new development's unfinished lots. Then Sergeant Melvin Renard is kidnapped during the department's sweep for more remains, and Hazel is warned off as the RCMP pulls rank. Hazel's instincts point to the foreboding Dublin Home for Boys, which sits at the development's border. Her adopted and long-deceased brother, Alan, spoke of the horrors in that state boy's home, where he spent his early years. Against orders, Hazel scours records to find Dublin Home boys who never became official adults, and looks for witnesses among those who did. As she searches for the truth behind the boys' murders, Hazel is haunted by the disappearance of a classmate in 1957 and struggles with her mother's increasing dementia. Wolfe, a pseudonym for Canadian writer Michael Redhill, blankets this thriller in an eerie, suspenseful calmness and showcases Hazel (played by Susan Sarandon in the movie version of The Calling, 2014) as a tenacious, sharply intelligent, reader-courting heroine.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)