“We’re not getting the Rottweiler,” I said as we drove to the SPCA a dozen years ago. But we walked all four dogs available for adoption, and Roxy the Rottweiler was the one who lick, lick, licked our arms and was so immediately gentle that I said, “This is the one.”
Our daughter, Anastasia, hesitated at first. And admittedly, Roxy sent both her and her brother Max flying through the air–they were too small to hold back a big dog if a squirrel came by. But they grew, and Roxy listens a bit better.
People advise you to gather around the dinner table. Our family isn’t good at that. But we do gather around our dogs. We pet them, we laugh at them, we tell them how good they are, we send pictures of them looking cute or derpy. When Max got depressed without his friends during COVID, or Anastasia retreats too long to her room, or I come home exhausted after a long ER shift, Roxy to the rescue!
Roxy has been diagnosed with an aggressive mast cell tumour. She had a low grade mast cell tumour that was excised in January, but I felt a lump close to the scar August 29th. She had surgery September 18th, but despite 1 cm margins, the ear side wasn’t clear. And I could feel the tumour growing daily preop.
Roxy’s going to her first oncology appointment on Tuesday for staging (ultrasound and biopsies), which happens to be her 13th birthday.
We’ll try to treat her as thoroughly yet as compassionately as we can, meaning that we want to eradicate cancer, but not at the cost of pointless suffering.
In the meantime, we’ve cancelled our trip to Italy to be with her while her life is near-normal. Roxy’s bright, she loves to eat (human food and treats, not dog food) and explore. She’s not in any pain. Today she met new friends who were worried that she’d fall down the stairs in their garage, but Roxy has excellent balance and is both smart and wise.
Please keep Roxy in her thoughts. We love, love, love our big girl.
I’m queer.
“I want to love more than death can harm. And I want to tell you this often: That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night — we can live. And we will.” Ocean Vuong
My book, The Red Rock Killer, is a finalist for the best juvenile/YA novel. (Amazon link is here)
My short story, “The Longest Night of the Year” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine), is a finalist for the best short story.
Only four people have been nominated twice in the same year since the history of the Crime Writers of Canada Award! That includes my new friend Twist Phelan.
I’m flying to Calgary, so I’m just putting up a few images. Congrats to all finalists, including my friends Cathy Astolfo and Marcelle Dubé. Tune in at 1515 to CBC’s All in a Day with Alan Neal if you want to hear an interview with me and Therese Greenwood.
“We’re talking about a bunch of mindless bottom-feeders whose general ignorance of our way of life is tempered only by their indifference to human suffering, we’re all agreed on that?”
“Is this the politicians or the killers?”
“Good point, but I meant the killers.”
This series follows a bunch of Mi5 (British secret service) agents who’ve messed up so badly that they end up at a building called Slough House and have been nicknamed the Slow Horses. They’re given mundane tasks, under a deliberately offensive leader named Jackson Lamb (“Ethical behaviour’s like a vajazzle on a nun. Pretty to picture, but who really benefits?”), in hopes that they’ll quit. Instead, they end up piecing together others’ diabolical plans and messing up the villains every time.
I love the humour. No, not Jackson Lamb insulting everyone, but agent Roderick Ho’s bulletproof belief in himself as the alpha and in his girlfriend, Kim; agent Shirley Dander, who is extremely skilled at deadly force but is child-like in cheating at the yellow car game and insisting on grabbing something to eat during their mission; and I literally laughed out loud at one point. No spoilers, but I was delighted by the ridiculous description of paint cans.
I usually find description boring, both as a reader and as writer, but Mick Herron is so good at embodying not only every human, but Slaugh House itself. I’ve never read a series that begins and ends with a description of the main building.
I also liked that the plot had more of an international angle but never pretends that Britain keeps its hands clean. If anything, Britain continually digs its own grave.
The Slow Horses books tend to have reasonably happy endings, but this one closes with a reminder that no one is infallible. Which I liked, because one character seems more superhuman than the rest in a way that sets off my B.S. meter. Great way to hook us in, Mick!
Warning: in addition to many humans, penguins die in this novel. I feel sad whenever I think about those penguins.
What I didn’t like: the politics. I never really read spy novels because I find politics full of reprehensible people fighting for power, which is one reason I picked the bottom feeder quote at the beginning.
“Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.” Jean Rostand, Thoughts of a Biologist
While Mick Herron seems to enjoys poking fun at these horrible humans, I hate seeing them take over, now more than ever:
“You lived in a democracy, and accepted that certain freedoms came hand in hand with certain dangers, or you opted for full-scale oppression, which severely curtailed the opportunities for unofficial slaughter, but potentially maximised the official kind.”
But I never give up hope. Later, I read Pádraig Ó Tuama‘s wonderful book, In the Shelter. I may write a review of this later. For now, I’ll end with a quote from him: “To greet sorrow today does not mean that sorrow will be there tomorrow. Happiness comes too, and grief, and tiredness, disappointment, surprise and energy. Chaos and fulfilment will be named as well as delight and despair.“
Hi! I joined CannonballRead, where book readers fight cancer. Gird your loins for book reviews!
Spook Street centres around David Cartwright, a spook (spy) emeritus who is now losing his memory, burdening his grandson River. River joined the Mi5 British intelligence service, following in grandpa’s footsteps, but became a laughing stock now resigned to a subunit in Slough House with the other “Slow Horse” agents with metaphorical egg on their faces.
But there are other spooks, too. We meet a new Slow Horse named Coe, who has been so traumatized that he can’t stand human contact and can only listen to music and play air piano, becoming a ghost of his strategic self. River himself thinks of Coe, his new office mate, as a dead man walking, but can’t be bothered to help him. Marcus, one of my favourite Slow Horses, while not itching for a fight or showing his office mate Shirley what waterboarding feels like, is losing the battle against his gambling addiction. Marcus points out that, thanks to insurance, he’s worth more dead than alive.
So at least three, arguably four, of these men are spooks emotionally as well as spooks as in slang for spies, and that’s only the beginning of the theme expertly woven throughout the novel.
As David Cartwright’s mind unravels, River ends up exploring his own past. How did River end up living with his grandparents? Why won’t his mother spend time with him? If you ever wondered, this is the book for you.
That said, it wasn’t my favourite book of the series, because memory loss is not a “reader cookie” for me. A reader cookie means as soon as you read that element, you want more. Memory loss is more like reader kidney beans for me. Fine, I’ll eat them, they’re good for me, but I’m not going to actively seek them out, even though Mick Herron is such a skilled writer.
Spook Street reminded me of the time author Kristine Kathryn Rusch told me that when former U.S. president Ronald Reagan died, his widow, Nancy, was heartbroken at his gravesite. Kris said something like, “Reagan had dementia and had lost his memory, but to her, he only died the day they buried his body. Where was he in between?”
I could see that this was a key question for Kris and one she would explore in her writing. For me, I could ask the question, and I could read other people’s answers, but it’s not a driving force for me. For this book, I didn’t enjoy reading (listening to) the grandpa David Cartwright passages, even though I knew I’d miss clues through my own inattention.
Also, River is just an okay character to me, and he takes up a good chunk of the real estate in this book. River’s not funny like Roderick Ho, he’s not tragic and noble like Catherine Standish, he’s not even deliberately grotesque to cover up his cunning, like Jackson Lamb. I figured out eventually that he’s supposed to be a young, impetuous, dense but possibly dashing James Bond/Jason Bourne type with a great institutional memory, but not for me.
Fair warning, the beginning is brutal, about a flash mob gone wrong, and I am in denial about the ending.
Spook Street is a worthwhile read, not for the faint of heart.
“I didn’t kill him,” an elderly woman quavered as soon as I pushed open the door of emergency exam room #4. “You have to believe me. Are you Dr. See?”
I’ve never had a patient greet me by talking about homicide. My heart stuttered while I gazed down at Ms. Danielle Upton. Even though she stood beside the exam room table in high heels, I still towered over this miniature woman who held out her right, wrinkled hand for me to shake, her eyes wide with trust and a judicious amount of eyeliner.
So. Many. Questions. I defaulted to my usual routine. “Hi, I’m Dr. Hope Sze.” I nudged my wheeled computer workstation inside the room and closed the door behind me, sealing us in with the faint smell of hand sanitizer and disinfectant. Her triage note said only 78 y.o. female, headache 7/10, wants to speak to MD. “I’m the resident doctor on neurology today.”
“Hello, Dr. See.” Ms. Upton shook my hand with more firmness than I’d expected before resting her fingers on the sizeable black purse taking up the bottom half of the exam room table. Her purse matched her simple sheath dress and contrasted with her pearl necklace. “Is that a Chinese name?”
I nailed a smile on my face. “Sure. Please tell me about your headache, Ms. Upton.”
“You can call me Danielle, Ms. Upton, musician, even ‘cat lady.’ I’ll answer to most things.” She smiled and bobbed her head in agreement with herself. “I didn’t kill him. It may look like murder, but it wasn’t.”
“Let’s start at the beginning. Do you have anyone with you who can help tell your story?” I asked while I fought with the computer to open her file.
Usually a caregiver will accompany someone with dementia to the emergency department. Even though I knew it was futile, I glanced around St. Joseph’s Hospital’s white exam room that barely accommodated my computer “workstation on wheels” (WOW), the black exam table, and the sink attached to the wall to the right of the table. Someone had already stolen the plastic chair I could’ve sat on.
“Goodness, no. I’m all alone.” Ms. Upton touched her purse again.
She might look ready for a cocktail party, but she hadn’t known to change into the hospital gown that still lay neatly folded on the table, squashed under her massive purse.
“That can be a problem,” I agreed, still waiting for Sarket, our electronic medical record system, to load her previous charts and help me figure out what was going on. The useless emergency physician who’d referred her had barely written “worst headache of life” before consulting neurology and ordering a CT scan of her head. Ah, the joys of working in a decrepit teaching hospital in Montreal, Canada. “How can I help you today?”
Closer up, Ms. Upton’s lipstick was slightly crooked on the right. “You can prove that I didn’t kill him, of course. But I’ll need to speak to a doctor first.”
“Yes, I’m your doctor. Dr. Sze, remember?” In fact, I’d recently started my second and final year of family medicine residency. In less than twelve months, I’d be fully licensed to go, although I’d applied for the emergency medicine program for another year of punishment.
Ms. Upton blinked at me. “A lady doctor!”
“Yes, we come in XX chromosomes now.” I couldn’t resist making a genetic joke, even if she might not understand it.
She clasped her hands together. “Oh, that’s wonderful. Perhaps you can help me with my murder charge.”
“Perhaps,” I said, instead of jabbing 911 on my cell phone. I’m a doctor. Throughout my training, my job is to stay calm, sort of like the eye in the tornado. First of all, you’re no longer supposed to argue with delusions, just listen and redirect.
Secondly, even she had shot someone, I’ve witnessed weirder crap in my life. I mean supernatural, never-speak-of-this-stuff like ghosts and dragons. A maybe-murderous grandmother would hardly make the cut.
“Thank goodness.” Ms. Upton wrinkled her forehead at me behind her wire rimmed glasses. If I elbowed her in the ribs, she looked like she might topple over. How could she have killed someone?
At long last, her previous records loaded up on Sarket. Danielle Upton, 78 years old. No recent blood work or brain scans, only a reference to a hysterectomy nine years ago. The Sarket EMR system didn’t connect to other hospitals or to family doctors (of course. See decrepit hospital, above), so I asked, “Did you bring any of your medical records with you?”
“No, I don’t take any medications,” Ms. Upton said, then cocked her head. “I suppose you’d consider me mentally ill for committing a murder. I believe that’s what’s giving me such a headache.”
I began the laborious process of closing her previous file and switching Sarket over to her current medical record. “Why don’t you tell me about that?”
Ms. Upton clasped her hands, her dark eyes still gazing deeply into mine. “I thought you’d never ask. I shot him six times in the head.”
“Hope” you enjoyed the opening chapter to Killing Me Sloth-LY, Hope’s Seven Deadly Sins Thriller 3: Sloth
I’m standing in a shower, warm water sluicing over my hair, with no idea of how I got here.
I touch the glass door of the shower. A white towel lies folded on the metal rail on the outside of the door. Three rectangular glass bottles hang in a rack on the door, one for shampoo, one for conditioner, and one for body wash, all made by a designer named H.A. Wilcox for the Innsmouth Hotel.
I bend over to pick up a green and yellow squeeze bottle called Dagon’s Swimmer Shampoo that promises to remove chlorine from my hair. I must be a swimmer. I glance down at my body, which does seem toned.
I dredge up vague memories of salt water stinging my eyes, and my arms cutting through waves. Yes, I must swim. I cling to that, pressing my fingers into the pristine grout between the grey tiles of the shower wall.
I have never heard of the Innsmouth Hotel. I’m not certain who I am. I should scream or cry or pound on the grey walls on three sides of me.
Instead, my hands reach for the metal shower knobs facing me. I spin the one on the right, and the water cools. I frown and twist the one on the left, cutting the stream to a few slow drips on top of my head, swiftly fading to nothing.
“Hello?” I call softly, securing the towel around me. I don’t want anyone to answer if I’m naked, and there are no clothes in the bathroom. I must have walked in here unclothed or in a towel, for reasons I no longer know or understand.
I wait for palpitations and panic. Instead, water drops roll out of my hair, onto my back. The ceiling fan drones, and my brain settles into a similar dull hum that I struggle to resist.
I step onto the white cotton mat in front of the shower stall, scanning the misted mirror and the countertop for clues. The side mirror’s built-in ring light already gleams, geared up for me to examine my pores.
I bend for the bath mat. I’ll wipe down the mirror to take a good look at my own face. That should teach me who I am.
I lift the mat, careful not to lose the towel wrapped around me, or to hit the two toothbrushes standing on the countertop.
Two toothbrushes. I glance from one to the other, both expensive electric models, one with a red plastic ring and one with yellow.
Who else checked into the Innsmouth hotel with me?
Outside the bathroom door, a phone begins to ring.
Author’s note: Thanks for checking out the prologue for this blood-congealing, Lovecraftian thriller, Killing Me Sloth-LY.
Soon Dr. Hope Sze may succumb to the deadly sin of sloth while surrounded by killers.
But wait! There’s more. Dive into art and poems that make you shudder in Cthulhu’s Cheerleader.
“My mom told me I could do whatever I wanted the whole summer I turned fourteen, so I decided to find the Red Rock Killer.” Read the first chapter and support The Red Rock Killer Kickstarter now!
Writing is lonely. We want to connect with readers, but even bestseller Lee Goldberg says he may never see people reading his books in public with the advent of ereaders. Solution: TURN YOUR BOOK INTO A PLAY. That’s what I did! The header photo is our final cast for the undercurrents festival.
Photo above of Stefanie Hitgano as Hope Sze resuscitating Melissa Landry as Elvis (photos by Jen Derbach from the TACTICS workshop).
And here you see Kameron (Eponine Lee) stepping forward. She played Juliet in R+J at Stratford. Shakespeare, Melissa Yi, same, same. 😊 Tucker was Dora-Award winning theatre maker Richard Lee, sitting with Hope, and Micah Jondel DeShazer, our director, sits above them.
I used to think I wrote for everybody. You know, we all love books. We are are all one.
Then I realized that Code Blues, the first Hope Sze mystery, opens with a swear word.
Code Blues is character-based and contains a sex scene, sarcasm, and a reference to racial injustice before Black Lives Matter. Cue the angry reviews. Cue even more because it’s free at the moment.
Okay! Well, Notorious D.O.C. sticks much closer to the mystery genre. Hope tackles a cold case on psychiatry after a woman asks her to investigate her daughter’s death. Not controversial at all, right?
Shoot. Maybe not everyone wants to read about poo on the first page.
Most readers immediately grasp the gravity of Stockholm Syndrome, where a kidnapper targets Hope and a woman in labour. But I don’t hold back on my description of the obstetrics ward, and one agent told me his assistant almost threw up after reading my first paragraph. I thought that was was pretty impressive considering that the first paragraph is literally two words: Birth smells.
Guess my writing ain’t for everyone after all.
When Kristine Kathryn Rusch first read my stories, she said, “They will have to create a new category for you. You’re so direct, you’re almost scary.” She paused. “You’re not supposed to compare writers, but Bob Jeschonek is the same way, for another reason. If you ask him to write a story about a space ship, he’ll write from the point of view of the space ship.”
Which may explain why I’ve always been fascinated by Robert Jeschonek’s writing. I hoover up stories in all genres, but he always does new things that had never occurred to me. For example, in A Pinstriped Finger Puppet’s My Only Friend, he starts off a section called Tomorrow.
Mind blown. How can you start in tomorrow? But he does wild things all the time, wandering in and out of the R-rated section, constantly inventive and challenging.
Pay what you want. If you choose $20 or more, you unlock all the books, including Robert Jeschonek’s exclusive Dog & Pony Show and my own Dog Vs. Aliens, Grandma Othello & Shaolin Monks in Space, and you can contribute to the charity Able Gamers. Only available for 21 more days, right here.
DeAnna is a truly inventive writer and friend. Come celebrate her offbeat culinary cozy, Your Soufflé Must Die, and see how she subverts interviews and genre expectations.
Melissa Yi: Are you more sugar or more vice?
DeAnna Knippling: While I do love both sugar and vice, I’m probably more tart than either sugar or spice!
A while back I sorted out what emotions seemed to be most strongly associated with what flavors, and what genres with what flavors, just as a goofy mental experiment. Sweetness as a flavor goes with falling in love, family, and social connections–a lot of romance! While crime fiction, on its own, tends to have a very dry, intellectual, complex flavor, like the bitterness of coffee, a seared steak, or chocolate.
I’m not really a sweet person or a drily intellectual one, though. I’m more of a sour person, craving the zing of excitement, challenge, and wit. I look for a layer of humor in everything I read and write, and I try to layer it in too, even in the darkest tale.
That being said, I do love both sweetness and bitterness–but the sourness comes for me, as a flavor and perspective on life.
MY: Interesting. One of the restaurants featured in Sugar and Vice is Tart of Darkness. Maybe you, or your heroine Sam, might fit right in!
YSMD makes me believe you’re a cook! Are you really? Or just a writer practiced in the art of deception?
DK: BOTH!
I love to get up to various shenanigans in the kitchen. I’ve been playing a lot with sugar syrups lately. How to make them, how to flavor them with little bits and pieces of leftover things from other projects, how to add them to both sweet and savory dishes. I’m not a serious cook, mind you; I’m just messing around. As I work with syrups, though, I’ve discovered that they’re a good way to preserve a flavor; they’re basically runny jelly! I recently also discovered that a gelatin-based mousse is basically just a sugar syrup with cream and gelatin in it, too. Jelly, syrup, mousse, caramel, taffy, marshmallows, hard candy, Turkish locum…they’re all kind of different expressions of the same basic idea of sugar crystals suspended in liquid, able to be transformed and translated between dishes, and pretty cheaply, too.
But I am also nowhere near enough disciplined to be able to do what Sam, the heroine of YSMD, does in the kitchen. I recently wrote a side-story, “COOKIE MADNESS!!!” about her making Christmas cookies for her catering company and figured out that she made something along the line of two thousand cookies. (She did get help decorating and packaging.) No way I could ever do that. I just don’t have that kind of attention span.
So if someone reads the book and thinks, “Wow! I bet the author knows her souffles!” well, that’s a lie. But I am a cook and I liked to mess around with recipes to try and understand why food does what it does, both physically and in what food means for us.
MY: Apart from the food, I really like the camaraderie and friendship in YSMD, but am driven slightly mad by her love life. How do you build complex relationships in your fiction?
Something that annoys me about a lot of romance novels is that they aren’t as messy as real life. Most romances are like, “You know what? You, and you, I want you to meet in a cute way, be attracted to each other, have some external conflicts to resolve, and BOOM, you’re done.” A lot of romances aspire to be simple and straightforward, maybe as a relief from the complexities of life.
And yet if you look back to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, what you’ll see is that the main character hates her real love interest, falls for some other guy, gets tired of him, decides she hates him (and then has to deal with him as a brother-in-law), continuously roasts her real love interest, gets set up with some douchebag by her mom, rejects him, accidentally seduces her real love interest, rejects him, finds out he’s a genuinely decent guy even if he is a socially awkward idiot, and finally decides he’s worth pursuing, even if it means admitting that she’s made an ass of herself.
I have no problem with the way most romances are written. They just aren’t for me. Here, I was reaching for romantic conflicts that reminded me of Jane Austen-level silliness. I really don’t think Sam’s love life could be any other way! I hope it pays off for the reader a little bit like the way Price and Prejudice paid off for me.
MY: This was seriously a fun read. I learned a lot about cooking, but also friendship and how to write setting, like sitting in a leather chair and waiting for it to deflate, or really wild chocolate or alien-themed feasts. YSMD doesn’t follow the usual cozy rules, which some readers will enjoy. Give it a whirl!
DeAnna Knippling writes eclectic crime, mystery, romance, and other stories with characters whose sense of justice gives them a bittersweet view of life. Her hobbies are cooking, taking long walks on Florida beaches, digging into the realm of open-source intelligence, fangirling over history, science, and psychology—and reading lots of fiction, graphic novels, and web comics while her tea goes cold. Author of the Sweet Granadilla and Dark & Cozy mystery series, you can find her at WonderlandPress.com.
M. H. Callaway has helped investigate a murder, toured the 3000 foot deep Falconbridge nickel mine and even met the Queen of England (though not all at the same time). She turned to writing, and her many distinctions include a nomination for the CWC Award for Best Novella for “Snake Oil,” which you can now preorder as part of her new collection, Snake Oil and Other Tales!
Fortunately, I got to interview M.H. before she ran off on her next adventure.
Melissa Yi: Do you prefer sugar or vice?
M. H. Callaway: Well, I have to admit that I lean to the dark side, both in my reading and writing. Readers have told me that some of my work, like my novellas, Snake Oil and Glow Grass, are really horror crossovers. That’s hard to wrap my head around, especially since I never read horror and avoid watching scary movies.
I’m not sure why I have such a dark vision and why it creeps into my stories. Perhaps it’s due to my unsettled childhood or fighting to make it in several male-dominated professions like science and management consulting! I’m delighted to see the progress that women have made in the last several decades.
But I’m not totally into Vice / Noir. Every once in a while I need to cleanse my palette with a cuddly cozy – and when I do, I enjoy every word. I’ve even written lighter work and to my surprise and delight, my two cozies published in 2022 were both short-listed for a CWC award. That said, Erik De Souza didn’t find “Must Love Dogs – or You’re Gone”, that light-hearted – perhaps it works as a black comedy.
MY: Does real life inspire your tales, whether dark or cozy?
MHC: How did you guess that I used a real small town as my inspiration for Amdur’s Ghost? In fact, Dunlop is a thinly disguised version of Goderich, Ontario where we have our family cottage. I’m afraid that none of the characters were inspired by and friends or family; they are all figments of my twisted imagination. They all come alive and speak to me as I write. Many times, the characters are what we wish for: they fight for justice.
Dr. Benjamin Amdur is the kind of civil servant we would want. He’s dedicated to looking after the people of Ontario and committed to saving our public health system. He’s a bit of fish out of water in Dunlop, an outsider in Dunlop, because he’s a “city rat” from Toronto and he has much to learn about rural culture in Ontario. He finds that there are many dedicated people just like him though different – in a good way.
So even though I don’t use real people as the basis for my characters, I am shameless in stealing settings! In Glow Grass, I used our family cottage and my husband maintains I used our own house as inspiration for Snake Oil.
MY: I did an ob/gyn elective in Goderich and I live in rural Ontario now. I don’t know if I steal settings so much as details like food. 🙂
MHC: Sugar and Vice is at the top of my cozy reading list. What a great idea to use the seven deadly sins to frame the new Hope Sze mystery series! And what better sin than gluttony? Everyone can relate to the delights of food, especially me!
MY: Sugar and Vice isn’t exactly a cozy. I tried to write a cozy thriller, so I’m afraid it’ll scare the real cozy fans away. You’re right about the food and gluttony, though!
MHC: I especially enjoyed the sensual details in Sugar and Vice. I can taste the yummy Chinese and Korean food while delighting in Hope’s witty assessments of the Dragon Boat competition, life, love, the universe and everything. It’s funny and light-hearted and draws you in: I can’t wait to find out who is fated to die and to have Hope catch the killer.
MY: Well, I can’t wait to read Snake Oil and Other Tales! I’m preordering it as a birthday gift to myself. Thank you, M.H.!
