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When we last saw Hazel Micallef, the sixty-something year old police detective from Port Dundas, Ontario, she was fretting over the proposed consolidation of the regional police force at her home base, a move that she feared would reduce her to a secondary role at best. Now, three years later, the move is about to take place and Hazel is unhappy. But before any definite change can take place, old bones start turning up on the site of a new and slightly dodgy sub-development. One of Hazel's policemen is abducted and held hostage. Then several grisly murders occur, crimes that seem related, and Hazel finds the whole affair taken away from her by the RCMP. Though warned off in no uncertain terms, she does find a way of pressing into the problem of the exhumed bones as well as into another mystery of the same vintage, the disappearance of a seventeen-year-old girl she knew fifty years ago.
Hazel has a personal interest in this latter case, as she may have been among the last to see Carol Lim before she disappeared and her adopted brother Alan, though only twelve at the time, had come under a certain degree of suspicion, largely because he was a bit odd. Now a kind of confluence of past events is coming to bear on Hazel. The old bones turn out to be those of former young inmates of the Dublin Home for Boys, an orphanage in Port Dundas. Alan had been in a similar institution before the Micallefs adopted him. As Hazel reflects, the present case is a trap door to her past.
Further compounding the seepage of past into present is the state of Hazel's mother, now ninety-one and suffering not from dementia but from a simple case of old age, of dealing with a brain that simply no longer works at full capacity. Occasionally she lapses into a vivid recollection of the past and is puzzled to discover where she is when she returns from it.
It has occurred to me in the past that though only one author (Michael Redhill) takes credit for this series, the books often have seemed to be the product of at least two imaginations. When Hazel is at the centre of the narrative, events unfold in a plausible sort of way; when she is absent, a kind of almost manic surrealism takes over and the reader is expected to follow a very twisted path indeed to the ultimate revelations.
Happily, Hazel is on board for a substantial part of this latest entry. Her creator may push her to the occasional feat of improbable survival but she is a marvellous character - solid, sensible, good-hearted, and very canny. I do hope that her impending 65th birthday will not force her retirement. I would miss her a great deal.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, January 2016
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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