April Snow

Chris Redmond is Director of Internal Communications at the University
of Waterloo.

Snow falls in Minneapolis in April. “Snow” also means cocaine, an illegal substance, which means nasty underworld characters, gunshots, deliberately broken arms, blood, and death. That about covers this slight thriller.

The northern winter, as described, seems familiar to Canadians. Otherwise this book, though Canadian-published, has nothing Canadian in it, except that “Nathan Phillips, private eye” happens to share his name with a former mayor and a public plaza in Toronto. Oh, and Phillips is a lovable bumbler who apparently owes a lot to Canadian Howard Engel’s Benny Cooperman. Vulnerable detectives must be in style; one thinks too of Stuart Kaminsky’s Toby Peters. And Minneapolis provides touches reminiscent of the Phillips Lore books, set in Chicago.

April Snow is worth reading once, for those who like cocaine-based crime thrillers with a few pleasant attempts at humour, and who don’t mind one or two gruesome scenes. It is not going to be a classic of the genre.