Blood Wine

April 28, 2014
Summer 2001: homicide detective Miranda Quin wakes up with a gap in her memory and her lover Philip Carter’s corpse next to her. She’s suspended from the force as a suspect, and it soon becomes clear that the scene was staged and Miranda was herself a victim, sexually assaulted after being drugged by the real killers. It also becomes clear that Quin didn’t really know the late Philip well at all; the man she thought was a lawyer was nothing of the sort. Finding the truth behind his murder will take the investigators into the world of organized crime and a maelstrom of violence where thousands of lives are at stake. The fourth entry in Quin and Morgan series, the work feels oddly dated, as though it was a very belated attempt to engage with or at least exploit the passions that followed the 9/11 attacks. The slowly expanding scale of the stakes is interestingly handled, but the plot as a whole fails to convince, with each new revelation underscoring the fact that this is an artifact of fiction in which every twist occurs according to the will of the author.

May 1, 2014
The fourth entry in the Quin and Morgan crime series opens with a bang. Miranda Quin, the Toronto homicide cop, wakes up in bed beside her lover, who has apparently been shot and disemboweled. Although Miranda has no memory of even being with him that night, the evidence shows that the disemboweling was done in the bed where the body was found. As if all that weren't strange enough, investigators soon discover that the identity of the man Miranda has known for almost two months is completely fictionalin a very real sense, the man simply doesn't exist. Miranda and her partner, David Morgan, are officially unable to work the case, but they work it anyway, off the books, and soon the questions mount up. Could Miranda somehow have murdered the man without remembering it? Or is she victim of an extremely clever frame-up? This is a fine entry in a consistently satisfying series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)