Heartbreaker

Geoff Cragg teaches in the Faculty of General Studies at the University
of Calgary.

This latest instalment in Laurence Gough’s mystery series featuring
detectives Willows and Parker is replete with the irony, black humor,
and police department politics that distinguished earlier volumes. The
story combines familiar ingredients: Chinese gangsters, an affair
between a handsome but dimwitted petty criminal, and a beautiful woman
with a shady past. What sets the book apart from its predecessors is the
author’s ingenious treatment of his Vancouver setting. Instead of fog,
drizzle, and wet snow, this is a landscape of heat and radiant light, a
showcase for the story’s bronzed and beautiful villains. In this
environment of “virtuality,” appearances reign supreme and reality
blurs into wishful thinking.